Smart Play Home School Group

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 13 2007

SCIENCE 2 - Despite the silliness and insanely short attention spans today, the boys really got the concept of friction as a force. The shoe experiment didn't work out at planned - their prediction that the carpet would require more force to move across than the wood floor or smooth table didn't hold all that true. Isaac's shoe was too light I think and he was disappointed that his hypothesis was false. The other 2 had numbers that were really close so it was not that great an experiment. Pushing the cars through air and than water really worked, though. The cool thing is that they are remembering the steps in the scientific process. They are really understanding this unit and using good examples so far.

SCIENCE K - learned about muscles and how they move the bones and other parts of the body (eyelids, blood). they remembered that the skull protects the brain and the ribcage protects the heart from Cindy's class yesterday. They felt their own muscles, Ella wanted them to feel her "big leg muscles." Made a model of a bone and arm muscles with paper towel tubes and balloons. We talked about the heart being a muscle, it's the size of your fist and we listened to Nadia's heart with a real stethiscope (hers was the only one that we could hear.) We did jumping jacks and ran in place to get our hearts pumping fast. They know that if your heart stops, you're dead. Talked about the brain and how it controls our bodies and contains our thoughts and doesn't stop when we're sleeping (dream discussion followed....). FYI - there are 666 muscles in the human body. Cindy, I'll put Suzy's anatomy book in Ella's backpack for Wed., they really like it.

It was a good day. Ditto Ranae on the blogging - great to read. R. Gavlinski