How animals move: the human skeleton (BFSU B6)

Moving on from food webs and biomes, we talked more this week about adaptations, in particular the skeletal adaptations of animals like ourselves. We read a few books, we watched a Bill Nye video (a few times, actually), and we did a number of craft activities. The goal of the section is to learn why bones and muscles are important, and to gain a general idea of how they work and what they are made of. We also spent some time talking about the differences and similarities between a variety of mammal skeletons, looking for unique adaptations, and we spent some time talking about the names of our bones.

The Skeleton Inside You (Let’s Read and Find Out Science 2) (Philip Balestrino, 1989). I'm fond of this science series, and this book was no exception. They do a nice job of keeping the subjects accessible without dumbing them down, and usually the illustrations add a nice touch.

Look at Your Body: Skeleton (Steve Parker, 1996). From the guy who did the Skeleton books for DK, only this version, now out of print, is without many of the usual DK distractions. We did not spend a lot of time reading this book, but did really enjoy the pictures and illustrations in it.

The Skeletal System and The Muscular System (World Book Human Body Works, 2007). This book is full of information, more than we needed for our current purpose, but its related in short paragraphs with helpful photographs or illustrations, and specific topics are easy to locate. We did more reading in this book than looking, while we did more looking in the Steve Parker book above.

The Magic School Bus: The Search For the Missing Bones (Eva Moore, 2000). Although I've always believed the Magic School Bus picture books to be too full of distraction and noise to be truly useful, I'm finding that the chapter books are much better. Calvin seems to enjoy them as well.

Rattle Your Bones: Skeleton Drawing Fun (David Clemesha and Andrea Griffing Zimmerman, 1991). Just some good drawing fun to go along with everything else.

Bill Nye the Science Guy: Bones and Muscles. These videos are awfully busy, but Calvin enjoys them, and this one was pretty good, as far as they go.

The Body Book: Easy-to-Make Hands-On Models That Teach and Easy Make & Learn Projects: Human Body (Donald M. Silver). I picked up these two as ebooks from the Scholastic dollars days sale. They turned out basically to be simple but fun printable crafting activities that we enjoyed doing one afternoon. We used only one small section from each for our look at human skeletons, but there will be other parts in each that come in handy later, too.

BFSU B5: Food Chains, and D4: Biomes

One of my favorite topics! This is not anything new to Calvin, really, but we had a good time really talking about food chains, and getting more specific about biomes than we have in the past. In addition to reading, hiking, and watching some videos, I found great maps on this site: I printed this one to color in, and brought this up on the screen for copying.

Who Eats What? Food Chains and Foods Webs. Patricia Lauber (1995). A Let's Read and Find Out About Science, book. Honest, forthcoming, and unflinching with simple illustrations, some crayon drawings that will encourage a child to get in on the action themselves.

What is a Biome? Bobbie Kalman (1997). Very informative but without being too dense. Photographs and illustrations are realistic and make great aids. My only complaint is that it can feel a little scattered, with too many tidbits added outside of paragraph text, but it's no DK nightmare book, and I found it completely usable.

Staying Alive: A Story of a Food Chain. Jacqui Bailey (2006). Another unflinching look at life, this book looks specifically at the food webs of the African Savanna, which makes it a good book to connect the topics. Comedic illustrations and interjections keep things funny, but can be distractions from the important text. Again, not on the level of a DK book, just minor distractions.

Pass the Energy, Please! Barbara Shaw McKinney (1999). Rich illustrations and rhyming text set this food chain story apart from the rest. I've reviewed this one before. It's a beautiful look at the significance of food chains. The rhyming can be stilted in some areas, but the book is well worth reading.

Life On Earth: The Story of Evolution. Steve Jenkins (2002). A wonderful explanation of the process of evolution and overview of the ongoing nature of time with Steve Jenkins's fantastic illustrations of pieced paper. This is another book to which we have returned many times. We have it in our personal collection, purchased used because, unfortunately, it's already out of print. What were they thinking???

We also watched all the Schlessinger Biomes in Action videos, which were available on DVD from our library. Their science videos (like all their vidoes) are cheesy, but they lack the flashing lights, quick changes, and gimics of other, more recent children's videos that are so distracting while providing good information. Each video shows kids (middle school age maybe?) visiting world biomes, and also running some (albeit questionable) experiments in a school or home lab setting. Calvin enjoyed them all.

Young Scientist Series Kit 5: Solids, liquids, and gases (review)

The solids, liquids, and gases kit came in a box with the volcano kit I wrote about last summer. We used it this week alongside the BFSU section on, of course, solids, liquids, and gases, and the demonstrations suggested there. As a side note, I bought a selection of these kits when they went on sale for half price at Zulily.com and paid only $12 a piece for them. So far I'd give them a generally favorable review, but I wouldn't ever pay $24 for one.

Included in the kit:
Instruction booklet (with a section for the parent and one for the child)
funnel
popsicle stick
balloon
glue
fiz tablets
borax
raisins

Needed from the house:
water, bowls, cups, measuring cups and spoons
small glass bottle with narrow neck
soda water
sugar
corn starch
food coloring
vinegar
baking soda

Instructions in the kit guide the user through observing raisins bouncing around in the soda water, using the vinegar and baking soda reaction to inflate the balloon, making a solid with corn starch, making "slime".

The good: we had fun with the kit. I handed Calvin the instruction booklet and we identified all the things we needed from the house and collected them, then he read through the instructions for each experiment and we tried almost all of them out (I didn't have corn starch). The experiments are fun—especially making "slime"— and I liked the "materials, methods, results, and conclusions" breakdown in the instruction booklet. Eventually he'll be writing those for himself, but seeing the process first is valuable.

The less good: After really enjoying his reading through the decently scientific insructions while we did the experiments/demonstrations, we realized that he'd been reading the "guide for parent, teacher, or supervising adult". The pages aimed at kids are less scientific, more cartoonish. The kid pages are still decent instructions, written as though a conversation with a bug, but Calvin and I preferred the parent instructions and will ignore the second half of the booklets from now on.

The disappointing: Every one of the experiments described and included can be found described in a variety of home chemistry and experiment books, while the list of what was included versus what was required additionally seemed random at best. I understand supplying the liquids, and also the bowls, utensils, etc., but if they're supplying the raisins, borax, and glue, why not supply sugar, food coloring, corn starch, and baking soda? Or how about supplying only the very rare oddities, like fiz tablets, and charging less for the kit?

Conclusion: I think I've said this before, but the only reason I would consider buying these kits again (at half price) is to have the instructions in a neat format (in the adult pages) that I can conveniently hand to Calvin and which we can write on and get messy, etc., etc. Plus there is something to be said for pulling out the box and having him get excited about what is coming up, but I assume that sooner rather than later he will be asking to experiment with household goods on his own, and then the kits will have done their job and become obsolete as a material good.

When we finished the kit I left Calvin at the counter with all the materials in reach and let him go to town, resulting in fizzy raisin and goop soup.

Solids, Liquids, Gases: Matter Matters!, By Calvin Ophoff

As part of our look at the first section in Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding, Calvin decided to make a book about the states of matter. I will write about BFSU soon, but first a look at the outcome from section one.