Homeschool Day 1/14

 Kindergartener

• Math workbook
• Read the first story in his reader from All About Reading
• Handwriting without Tears

Five in a Row

We finished the unit on Owl Moon.  We set a stopwatch and timed several different units of time - like a second, 5 seconds, 1 minute, etc.  We did some of the art activities in the teacher's guide and he painted a picture of a snowy tree with a moon overhead.  

13 Year-old

• Algebra 
• Language Lessons for the Secondary Child
• Free reading from her book crate + a read-aloud
• Apologia's Anatomy & Physiology together - reading about muscles and tendons
• She spent a ton of time actually watching and helping with the 15 year-old's biology lab

15 Year-old

• Algebra 2 - dinomial theorems - ugh!  What a mess...
• Wordsmith Craftsman - more outlining, which is really offending her, because I think Wordsmith Craftsman might just be way too easy for her
• Huckleberry Finn
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
• Listened to "Yankee Doodle" with its real lyrics - read the history behind the song
• We skipped German, because the biology lab took so long
• Biology lab - pond water

Biology Lab - Pond Water

I've done the pond water thing a million times, but this lab was incredible today.  The pond water that had rice sitting in it created a protist population bloom that was awesome.  I used blue stain to make the protists really stand out.  We were able to actually see cilia and flagella moving under our microscope, along with protists rotating in the water - which is usually something too difficult for us to catch at home.  We were also able to see a paramecium puncture its cell membrane and then the cell lyse under the microscope.  It was a pretty incredible lab. 

Here is a video my 13 year-old shot with her camera using our microscope.  Adding blue stain to the pond water really makes a difference.