Weeks in Review #35-40

Okay, I’m calling it. School year 2010-2011 is dead, and I’m glad. Glad, I tell you! We didn’t quite finish everything, but that’s okay. The beauty of homeschooling is that you’re never behind - you’re always where you are. Hahaha! Don’t listen to me; that’s just what I tell myself when we’re behind.

Anemone thought the fetal pig dissection from February 2010 was stinky.

Math: Oh, I don’t want to talk about math. But I will, because I’m all about being real and honest and transparant and all that. JellyMan did lessons 90-92. Then he made a C on a test. I was disappointed. He did lessons 93-96. He made a C on a second test. I grew irate. So JellyMan did lessons 61-96. Again. Anemone did lessons 90-96. Then she made a big fat F on a test. I was, shall we say, less than pleased. So Anemone did lessons 80-96. Again. Then she did lessons 97-112. Now they are both keeping a 90% average in self defense. Anemone should finish Algebra I this month, and I’m hoping JM will finish Advanced Math by October. Please, God. I’m so sick of Saxon Advanced Math.

She didn’t want to do it.

Latin: JellyMan finished Henle Latin Book 2, and made a 97% on the final exam. Anemone is almost done with Unit 7 of Henle Latin Book 1. Almost. Her pronouns are giving her fits.

Greek: JellyMan finished Athenaze Book 1. Anemone finished Elementary Greek 1.

I made her do it anyway, mostly just to laugh at her facial expressions.

English: JellyMan is halfway through Classical Rhetoric With Aristotle. He has produced several outstanding essays for this course! He watched some Teaching Company lectures on Shakespeare. He read Macbeth, The Tempest, Two Noble Kinsmen, and bits of Troilus and Cressida. He also read Lillith’s Cave: Jewish Tales of the Supernatural by Howard Schwartz and reread his favorite bits of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He also started planning for NaNoWriMo. Anemone did lessons 69-88 of R&S English 8 and read a few chapters of Emma. Anemone hates Emma. Emma is stupid. Emma should go read a book and mind her own business. And that Mr. Knightly sure likes to hear himself talk!

We were in the middle of a PCS, and had to do the dissection in a playground. People were staring.

History: JellyMan finished Desire of the Everlasting Hills and read Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus. “Argh! It cuts off in midsentence! They lost the ending! Nooooo! They’re always losing stuff!” Anemone worked her way through DK’s History of the World, stopping on page 323. I had hoped to reach page 361, but who’s counting??? They both watched several documentaries on the Roman Empire and read A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities by J. C. McKeown. That book certainly spiced up our dinner conversation!

JellyMan didn’t care, but Anemone was mortified.

Science: JellyMan completed Basic Physics: A Self-Teaching Guide. He did not master physics with this book, but I’m hoping it was enough to get him through introductory astronomy. Anemone, um, Anemone, uh, she did… nothing. She’s reading A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson now, so I’ll just go ahead and count it. I’ve decided to scrap my “no formal science until high school, then use college texts for non-majors” plan and use a traditional high school textbook with her this year. She likes science, she wants to learn “real” science, and she seems happiest when she’s using a fill-in-the-blank sort of book, so I ordered Miller & Levine Biology. When it arrived, we both flipped through it.

Me: “Wow, this is stupid.”

Anemone: “Wow, this is great!”

We start Monday.

Fine Arts: JellyMan spent over 100 hours working backstage at the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival. His first show was The Tempest. He did curtains, some lighting, gophering, etc. His second show was Two Noble Kinsmen. He started out as the assistant to the stage manager, then catastrophe struck - he graduated to stage manager and ran the light booth for the last few shows. They liked him so much that they recommended him to the light guy for another theatre, which means he’s not around much on the weekends. He had two auditions for his Shakespeare drama class, and of course he was invited back for another year. He also went to see Henry IV, Part 2. 

Anemone has been dancing. And dancing. And dancing. Over the summer she got promoted, strapped on a pair of pointe shoes, and danced 20 hours per week. Her hours have been cut since the Hawaii school year stared, and now she’s down to 17 hours per week. Nutcracker auditions will soon be upon us! She also went to see JellyMan work the curtains and lights of The Tempest and Two Noble Kinsmen. She has started altering t-shirts to suit her, and likes to make miniature food out of fimo clay. (I’m trying so desperately to make it sound like Anemone is Doing! School! but. But, but, but.)

Piano continues on as usual - they both practice an hour every day. Well, most days. Their piano teacher is on vaction, so they’re slacking off a little. 

In other news, they went to see a juried art exhibit at the Honolulu Gallery of Art, and two other smaller local exhibits around town. They also saw Romeo and Juliet, a ballet featuring principal dancers from all over the country. I wish I could have seen it, but we could only afford two tickets. I hope they remember this when they’re picking out our nursing home.

I like this picture because Anemone looks like a bobblehead. Also, she can’t hide her fascination with internal organs.

Phys Ed: Hiking, mostly, and many trips to the beach. I had big plans for PE this year. We did all right, I guess. There was surfing. There was sailing. There was scuba. There was swimming. There was hiking. But there wasn’t as much of it as there should have been, because rolling around on the beach is much more agreeable.

Anemone is karaticizing the fetal pig. I don’t know why.

Okay, I’m ready! Bring on the new school year! 2011-2012 is going to be awesome! I say that every year, but this time I really mean it. I’m going to kick the living hell out of this school year, just like Anemone did to that stinky fetal pig.

Homeschooling my Goobers is endlessly amusing.

Homeschool Frog Dissection

Ha!  You thought I was going to skip the dissection this week, didn't you?  You really should have known better than that.  Now for the usual disclaimer:  This is just for fun, not for a science credit, cutting up dead things is our idea of a good time, get off my back, blah, blah, blah.

"Them sy-reens did this to Pete! They loved him up and turned him into a horny toad!"

I had a few issues with my frog.  First I found the remains of its last meal in its mouth.

Then I discovered it was a girl frog.

Damn!  I got the girl frog in high school, too.  I have absolutely no luck when it comes to frogs.  The Goobs both had boy frogs, so they had time to do their entire dissection while I was still scraping the eggs out of my frog's carcass.

See how nice and clean that looks?  Anemone is holding up the liver so she can locate the gall bladder.  All those yellow strings are fat stores. 

This was by far the easiest dissection we've done; everything was so nice and big compared to all the mini-critters we've been cutting up.  It was also the messiest dissection.  It's a good thing I never aspired to be a surgeon - I can't even remove frog eggs neatly.  I might have flicked a few into Anemone's hair.  Ssshhh!  Don't tell her.

Here Anemone is doing some unauthorized procedure on the severed head of her frog.

It just gets worse from here. 

But I'll spare you the gory details.

Homeschool Perch Dissection

None of us particularly wanted to dissect a perch this weekend.  It's a fish.  Whoop-dee-doo.  We're from Alaska, where fish guts are perhaps even more common than dirt.  We suited up and did it anyway because The Goobers really want to get to that fetal pig.

I'm going to quit taking pictures of JellyMan.  He's reached "that age."  You know, the age at which you'd rather frickin' DIE than let your mother take a picture of you.

Well, would you look at that.  Fish guts.

Wow.

Is that *gasp* an air bladder?  

Wow. 

As I explained the workings of the excretory system, JellyMan amused himself by attempting to extract the entire digestive system through the anus.

Yep, he's definitely reached "that age." 

Homeschool Starfish Dissection

This week we finally got to dissect something that we have a little bit of experience with. I dissected a star fish in high school (not that I was paying attention) and The Goobs have been peeling live starfish off docks and piers since a naturalist showed them how in 2005.

The naturalist told us everything she knew about starfish. She especially wanted us to know that starfish are not really starfish, but sea stars. She was so forceful about it that I decided forthwith to work the word "starfish" into the conversation as frequently as possible just to get on her nerves. I amused myself with this all afternoon, and I'm fairly certain the naturalist was happy when our appointment was over.

Can you see the brown, mucous-y stuff all over the starfish in the next picture? That is the starfish's soft body tissue squeezing up through the skin. It felt exactly how it looked. And do you see all the drips on the concrete? The starfish dripped water the entire time we were examining it, and by the time we put it back in the water all its insides were back where they were supposed to be. The mucous and the tube feet made quite an impression on The Goobs and it was quite possibly the most successful field trip we ever had.

Fast forward four years, and The Goobs still remember pretty much everything the naturalist told us about starfish.

"They're SEA STARS, Mom!"

Right. They remember nearly everything the naturalist told them, which means I didn't have to read the entire introduction to the dissection in our book, but I did anyway because I remember next to nothing about the starfish - "SEA STAR!" - lecture. Tough luck, Goobs.

The first step in the dissection was to cut off the end of a ray.

It's not as easy as it sounds.

Anemone's starfish was big and tough, and we ended up breaking two scalpel blades on it before the dissection was over. (I say "we" but I mean "me." Poor Anemone's hands weren't strong enough to handle her starfish - I was afraid she'd cut herself.)

If you've ever lain awake nights and wondered just what was inside a starfish, you can quit wondering right now because I'm about to show you.

See all that yellow stuff? (It was red in Anemone's starfish.) That is the digestive gland, and all the little pouches you see secrete the starfish's digestive fluid. It seems that none of our starfish were killed during mating season, but I believe those fleshy pink things along the side are the sex organs.

"Hey, mom, I can't find my gonads."

"Hahahahahahaha!"

"Mom! I mean my starfish's gonads!"

"It's a SEA STAR!" 

"Hahahahahahaha!"

This is what my starfish looked like after I had identified the pyloric ducts, stomach, stone canals and rectal pouches.  That's right.  Rectal pouches.

That's it and that's all, folks.  Tune in next week for the dissecton of a perch.  Wow!  I get all tingly just thinking about it!

Homeschool Clam Dissection

Let me just get the usual disclaimer out of the way:

****WARNING**** 

This dissection conforms to no known educational standard.

We're just a bunch of Squares killing time on a Saturday afternoon.

****THANK YOU****

Okay, I feel better.  None of us particularly felt like dissecting clams this weekend, but we were afraid we might miss something important so we suited up and got to work.  JellyMan ran into difficulties right away; his clam had clammed up and didn't want to open. 

Anemone's clam was much more obliging, and as JellyMan wrestled with his recalcitrant bivalve she poked at it repeatedly and said things like, "Ew, you really eat these things, Mom?"

Not anymore, Anemone.  Not anymore.

The ribbed flaps you see are the clam's gills.  There are two pairs of gills on either side of the clam.  When you cut them crosswise, you can see that the ribbing is made up of little tubes.  I wish we had a better microscope - maybe Santa will bring us one next Christmas.

We also readily identified the foot, the labial palps, the mouth, the incurrent siphon, the excurrent siphon, the two abductor muscles and even the digestive gland.  We had trouble with the rest of the internal organs, though.  We were disappointed in the bland brown-ness of the specimen; it is difficult for us to distinguish one brown tube from another, and I think we would have been much better off just buying a live clam at the grocery store.  JellyMan was getting frustrated at the blandness of the clam and the vagueness of the instructions, and said, "But, Mom, how are we supposed to DO this?" 

I answered, "How should I know?  I've never dissected a clam before, either."

"What?!?!?  You've never DONE this before?!!?"

"No, I haven't!  And even if I had, it would have been over 15 years ago and I wouldn't have been paying attention anyway!"

"What do you mean you wouldn't have been paying attention?!?"

Sigh.

We decided to just slice our speciments in half in two directions to see what we could see. 

Cutting it this way wasn't especially helpful:

But cutting it this way was:

We didn't find everything we were supposed to find, but we did find the intestine, the gonad, and what we think is the cerebral ganglion.  We also saw some sinus cavities.

Next week we'll move on to the sea star dissection.  Woo-hoo.  At least I dissected one of those in high school.  (Not that I was paying attention or anything.)

Homeschool Grasshopper Dissection

I was just envying admiring Lisa's girls and their tidy dissections over at Wildflower Academy.  (They are always dressed nicely, too.  And they have great hair.)  Our dissections always start out nice and tidy.  See?  In this picture, Anemone is showing me how she delicately ripped off the wings and legs of her grasshopper.

So far so good.  JellyMan is checking out the spiracles on his grasshopper's abdomen.  The grasshopper breathes by way of its spiracles.  Our book says you can watch the spiracles in action by blowing into one with a medicine dropper, but that didn't work so well.  I asked Anemone just to blow into one herself, but she refused.  Lame.

Hey, things are still looking neat and clean(ish.)  Those little capsules are the grasshopper's eggs, in case you were wondering.  JM thought they were parasites at first.  I told him he was not far off the mark. 

"MOM!"

Yes, we can run a tidy operation for a little while, but eventually things start to go downhill.  We get frustrated trying to view the workings of grasshopper venilation and our specimens end up looking like this:

What IS all that stuff?  Frankly, we don't really know.  I mean, we know in theory.  We know which part is the crop, and which part is the stomach, and which bits are the gastric ceca, but could we identify the salivary glands?  The malpighian tubules?  The segmental ganglia?  No, we couldn't.  It turns out that the internal organs of the grasshopper, much like those of the crayfish, are made up of one nondescript brown tube after another.

After flinging bits of grasshopper all over the patio, The Goobers went to work on an extra credit dissection on a leftover crayfish I found underneath a fetal pig.  Then things really started to get messy. 

I can never take a good picture of JellyMan during these dissection sessions.  It's like trying to photograph Cousin It - all I can see is hair.  

Hey!  There's his chin!

And now it's gone again. 

But I know how to get a Goober's attention - just ask him what he wants for dinner.

Whoa! 

Hey, nose, where are you taking that kid?

Man.  I really wasn't expecting that.  The last time JellyMan took a bad picture was about thirteen years ago:

Two bad pictures in thirteen years.  Not too shabby, JM. 

Homeschool Crayfish Dissection

Before we start, I'd like to remind everyone that this dissection kit was a Christmas gift, okay? It is not a part of any formal science program; in fact, we're not trying to learn anything at all.  We're just trying to have a little bit of fun while we're still young.

The first thing you'll notice is that we are dissecting the crayfish in the house and not on the back porch as planned.  When we woke up the morning of dissection day it was pouring rain.  I wanted to reschedule, but The Goobers said, "Oh, but you promised!"  Ugh.  I hate it when I make promises - they always come back to haunt me.  The second thing you'll notice is that it's really hard not to learn something during a dissection.

See these worksheets on the exterior anatomy of the crayfish? I didn't assign them because I had some silly notion of this activity conforming to state standards for the study of biology.

I just needed some papers for their portfolios.  Besides, it's good for them to fill out worksheets. That's what kids in the real world do, right?  We must learn to embrace the worksheet.  And anyway, if I asked my Goobers to sketch their own crayfish, we'd never get to the fun part.

Once we learned to embrace the worksheet, we learned how not to hold a scalpel:

After that we learned that the person holding the book should be very clear when she reads the instructions, or people will end up cutting off bits that shouldn't be cut off just yet:

And here we learned that it's okay if somebody doesn't follow the instructions exactly because that somebody will probably end up doing it right in the end.  This picture is of a gill attached to a leg.  As the legs move, the gills wave like a flag, stirring up the water and delivering more oxygen to the bloodstream.  Nifty, right?  (I did ask The Goobers to sketch this part - I couldn't help myself.)

After the gill episode, we went on to learn more about how not to dissect a crayfish:

Don't do it this way, either:

Um, this way is also the wrong way, but by this time we had figured out that crayfish do not have veins, so all was not lost. 

Eventually we gave up trying to follow the instructions and just sliced and diced with abandon. When someone came across something interesting, I looked it up at Cornell University's crayfish dissection tutorial. Between the three crayfish, we found almost (but not quite) everything we were supposed to find. It is my hope that by the time we get to high school labs we'll have refined our dissections skills enough so that we can each find everything in only one crayfish. It's good to have goals, yes?

Homeschool Earthworm Dissection

We gave JellyMan the advanced dissection kit from Home Science Tools for Christmas this year.  We were all really excited until we opened the box - talk about a stink!  The smell dampened our enthusiasm, and by the time all the holiday festivities were over nobody wanted to dissect anything anymore.  On Friday The Goobers overheard me relating this sad tale of woe to my friend Tressa and said, "Hey, let's dissect something today!"  This was too much for me to handle on Friday, so I promised them we would do it on Saturday if all their school work was done, figuring they'd lose interest again.

These are all the specimens included in the advanced dissection kit.  We ended up with a fetal pig, a starfish, a crayfish, a clam, a frog, two grasshoppers, a something-or-other, and an earthworm.  The earthworm is the first project in our How To Dissect book (also included in the advanced dissection kit), so that's what we went with.

First I related all the important safety rules.  "Now, Goobers, I know it's tempting, but don't eat the fetal pig.  Keep the scalpel away from your sister's eyes, JellyMan.  Anemone, stop poking JellyMan with the forceps.  Don't drink the formaldehyde, and for the love of God, get that grasshopper out of my sandal!"  After that we read from the introduction, especially the part that tells us, "The specimen is not a loaf of bread....don't cut, dissect!"  After a few meaningful glances at JellyMan, I let the Goobers loose.  The first step was to figure out which side of the worm was which and pin it down, dorsal side up. Check.

JellyMan, brave soul that he is, stepped up to the plate and took the first swing at it. The goal was to cut through the skin (and only the skin) all the way down the length of the worm. He started out great, but he got impatient and started tearing through all the gunk in the middle. (Hey. We were as yet wholly ignorant of the inner workings of earthworms. It was still just gunk to us.)

Anemone stood by and watched this for as long as she could. Finally she sniffed and said, "JellyMan, lie down before you hurt yourself."

Do you see those little strings? They're called septa, and they gots to go.  Our next task was to slice through them to sever the skin from the body cavity.

JellyMan took over the operation with a cool, "I'll take it from here, Anemone."  Just look at him!  So calm, so collected!  So steady under pressure! Ack!  Too much pressure, JellyMan!  Remember, "the specimen is not a loaf of bread!"  Okay.  Move over, kid.  Mama to the rescue.  But we don't have any pictures of that because I was wearing my I'm-Cutting-Up-Dead-Animals outfit, and nobody needs to see that.  (And I know I probably shouldn't have rescued him, but you know what?  This is not high school and we only had the one worm.  It seemed like the right thing to do.)

After I mopped up after JellyMan (there were little bits of worm all OVER the place) we got to the fun part - the flaying and the skinning and the pinning.  Ewwwww.  Anemone enjoyed this part much more than necessary.  I worry about her.  In fact, I worry about her a lot.

 After identifying all the little squirmy bits of worm guts I cut through a section and had the kids look at it under our "microscope." (Note to self: buy a microscope.)  We didn't see much of interest on the inside, but we were able to make out the pores and various other holes on the outside.  That's something.

And then the Mad Scientists hammed it up for the camera, because, after all, it's not every day that you peel your first worm. 

And because I'm a drag (and because I really need The Goobers to generate a few science papers for their yearly portfolios) I printed off a few worksheets for them to fill in.  They used the dissected worm and the encyclopedia as references.  They also took turns reading aloud from the How To Dissect book, finishing the earthworm section and checking out the next critter on our hit parade - the crayfish.

By the way, the smell wasn't nearly as bad as we thought it was going to be.  I'm still glad we did the dissection outside, though!