Weekly Wrap Up 5/26/17 Coop ends

Happy 13th Birthday to my wonderful Son!  We now have two teenagers in the home!  They grow up so fast and while I love to see my kids flourish, I do miss those baby days.

Last month we took him to a baseball game, and the Cardinals won!  MarioFan loves going to  the games:)

2 weeks ago was the last week of our Coop where the kids were taking a few classes.  We are very disappointed that the two teachers that teach the classes my kids are interested in are leaving the coop to start up their own more conservative coop.  Because of this we will not be able to continue taking classes with them.  I am waiting to see who will replace them in the current coop and see if we have a coop to use next year:(.

At the Brain discovery class the kids were looking at synapsis and did an interesting experiment using round worms.

First they had a short talk about what is a synapsis

Next they were given two liquids to pour into containers with grids on the bottom

A round worm was placed into each container 

The kids were asked to watch and count the movements of the round worm

Close up picture of the round worm, I am told the triangle end is their tail, not their head which is what I thought.

After observing and counting the grid the worm traveled they compared which liquid the worm was more active in.   the worm in the plain water was not nearly as active as the one placed in the caffeinated liquid.  They discuss why and wrapped up understanding synapsis.

Unfortunately we missed the very last class due to the flooding we had in our town and I was unable to make it in to the city.  We were both disappointed but I am in touch with the teachers hoping we can join in next year if only to do the very last class which was visiting the various laboratories in the University.  We won't know until September if we will be allowed to do this.

At home in Science we have been working on learning about plants and this week we dissected a Lilly.

We examined the parts of the flower

dissected and labels the different parts

Compared leaves and determined which was a Eudicot

and which was a Monocot

Several days later we even noticed the sticky liquid coming out of the pistil of the flower.

Last week was the last week of our mini book club and the boys have read the book wonder and did a few activities to go along with the book.

This is a great book about bullying, kindness and acceptance.  I found a literature guide on pay teachers for about $6 so we had a few activities planned for the boys

the boys used a poster to describe what made them unique and different and MarioFan surrounding his with pictures of things he like, which is mostly electronics:)

The boys had fun reading and learning about each other.  In the package I purchase there were also some photos of the characters in the book and we wrote down their character traits and flaws as we discussed the book (oops I forgot to take a picture of that)

While we are officially finished with our local coop, we school year round taking breaks as we need it.  We usually do a much smaller schedule so the kids can do other things.  I am still working on our summer schedule which I will post soon:)  right now we are just taking a little breather:)