Mad Scientists Week 1

I am way excited about science this year. We are using NOEO Chemistry 1. I love that it suggests a variety of (mostly) living books, notebooking pages for narration, and lots of experiments. We're doing things a bit different than we did last year and I am sure it will have a positive outcome. During the week, I am completing the reading and narrations with the boys, then on Friday afternoons, we are getting together with my friend (Tina) and her sons (Ameer and Tamir) to do the experiments!

This week, due to scheduling conflicts, we did our experiment today. We read "What's Smaller Than a Pygmy Shrew"...highly recommend this great book...and learned about cells, atoms, ect. It only seemed appropriate to create our own model of a cell. BUT...ours was edible! We followed this plan..http://www.accessexcellence.org/AE/ATG/data/released/0251-NickHoffman/. Before we got our hands dirty, Tina went over the various parts of a cell and what their functions are. The boys kept saying, "My nucleus is telling my vacuole to store some food!" We didn't make them wait long...

Our little scientists!

We used Jello for the cytoplasm and Thane used a red candy for his nucleus and jelly bellies for his vacuole.

Magnus is carefully placing his ribosomes (Nerds) in his cytoplasm. The green blob is a golgi body (some sort of jelly candy) and I believe the white mass is a lysome (marshmellow).

This is Magnus's cell. Tina had the fabulous idea of using a Fruit Roll-Up for the cell membrane! Isn't she creative!?! It came in handy because the Jello started "melting" after awhile.

A view of Thane's cell from the top!

Thane and his cell.

Time to eat!

This was the best project to get started with. The boys were really into it and can not wait for next week! Tina's got some sort of wire mobile model idea whirling around in her head so we may be trying something like that next time!