• Mar. 4, 2009
Molecules and Elements
Would you like to know a secret? I thought you might, you nosy person you! 
OK, here it is. Up until the last month, we had not done science all year long. Whew, now that's off my chest.
I was actually talking about science and history with some moms in the new co-op we joined. Some ladies feel bad because they haven't done anything but basics all year. Some have only done basics, but are perfectly fine with that. Me, well lets just say that if it weren't for the "extras" that we can do, Taylor would have been sent to public school long ago. Science, history, art, and hand crafts keep me sane in our homeschool. The 3 r's may be necessary, but they certainly aren't fun. I'm tired of trying to make them fun. I think I'm to the point where I just say, "Look, I don't care if you like it or not. You're just going to do it." Then I can put my energy into the fun stuff and not feel like a failure all the time. So yes, we do a lot of projects and extra things in school, but it's certainly not because I'm some sort of supermom. It's simply because if I didn't take the time for that, we would never survive the day.
That being said, I found this great book last year at Goodwill for 50 cents. It's called Super Science Concoctions and it's full of chemistry experiments and activities. I wanted to study chemistry this year so we are using this for our base text and also supplementing with the chemistry lapbook from Hands of a Child. It's going really well so far. We made these model elements and molecules out of colored marshmellows. Taylor said, "Hey, I didn't know you could make stuff in science to!" 
My poor deprived child has been given so much history that she didn't even know there was a great world of science out there also.
Here's our first molecule. It's pretty cool how 2 gases put together can make water.
And most impressive is our glucose molecule. This one's a doozy.
Of course when we were done building, we got to eat some marshmellows too. Not the used ones of course. They were all hard and yucky, but the ones in the bag were still perfectly good.
Comments
• Mar. 9, 2009
Untitled Comment
Posted by kristenph
Fun, fun, fun!
BTW, thank you for your note about my blog. You were the first to mention the problem to me and it may be helpful to know when it had started. For some reason my blog is not always opening in Internet Explorer. In Firefox it works fine. I have noticed when I was testing, that if you click the back arrow when you get the error message that the page will load after that. I don't know if that will work for you or not.
