Human Body Unit

click to enlarge

We have covered major body systems in our school before: the cardiovascular system, the nervous system, a genetics unit, and a few different units on babies. I thought it would be fun this time to talk about some of the amazing things people can do using all the different parts of their bodies. So, I called this unit "The Amazing Human Body." This was also a good lead-up to the birth of baby #9 in our family, as we ended with a review of babies and human reproduction!

It was kind of fun to have our section on "Bones" correspond with the week of Halloween—we made this cool life-sized skeleton out of milk cartons, and it made a perfect Halloween decoration for our porch! :)

Our milk-carton skeleton was a friend for this skeleton we already had!

More Bones activities: 

A life-size skeleton print-out (we printed several of these and the children colored them)
A video about the skeletal system

A diagram of major bones, for labeling
A little online skeletal system game

For muscles, 

we learned how muscles worked and made models of extensors and flexors.
We learned about some famous martial artists.
We watched some amazing gymnastic routines (here are some examples),
The kids LOVED seeing some of Damien Walters' work—he is a stuntman who does amazing tricks!
And we watched some Buster Keaton movies to learn about physical comedy in movies.

For the heart and lungs,

We made these lung models again,

We talked about deep-sea divers and this amazing man, Stig Severinsen

We learned about several Olympic athletes such as Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, Eliud Kipchoge, and Rowan Hooper, an ultramarathon runner. 

We learned about anaerobic vs. aerobic respiration, oxygen exchange, and altitude sickness.

Here are some more activities about the heart and lungs.

For sight and hearing,

We learned about blind people who "see" using sonar or clicking sounds (see also here)

We watched a video about this archer with incredible eyesight (and reflexes!)

We learned about Stephen Wiltshire, a man with Savant Syndrome, who can remember and draw whole city skylines

And Derek Paravinci, who has an incredible ability for playing music by ear
We also watched some videos about samurais, marksmen, and archers, all of whom have developed their eyesight and reflexes in pursuit of excellence in their sports.

For memory, 

We learned more about short-term memory, long-term memory, mnemonics, and Savant Syndrome.
We watched a movie about Kim Peek, about whom the movie "Rain Man" was made. I haven't seen Rain Man, but we loved learning about Kim. We learned that he was a member of our church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he loved the Book of Mormon!
We also learned about Daniel Tammet, who has a prodigious memory.

We also learned about Babies--

We did some activities we've enjoyed before (like swaddling, learning to change diapers, etc.), we read some of our favorite books, and the children even got to help do an ultrasound on me in preparation for the new baby!

Dugway Geode Beds Field Trip

(Cross-posted from our family blog)

We seem to end up studying geology every few years in our homeschool—it's just one of those subjects we like too much to leave alone for long. We've been on field trips all over Utah collecting rocks, but we've never been to the Dugway Geode Beds before. It's probably because I got scared off by reading how to get there. You have to drive on a dirt road for over an hour, and then you need a "high-clearance vehicle" for the beds themselves. After getting stuck in our minivan out in the middle of the desert west of Delta several years ago, I didn't want to risk that ever happening again! So I always basically dismissed the geode beds as an option, even though they sounded like a cool place to go.

But…now we have an enormous van instead of a minivan. And I found a day that Sam could go with us. So I thought we might attempt it!

It turned out to be a beautiful day, and the dirt road was really quite well-maintained and not hard at all to drive on. (Well…Sam was actually the one driving. But I don't think it stressed him out too much either!) And it was pretty! Really pretty wild desert scenery, if you like that sort of thing—and I do. I had read there is even a herd of wild horses out there, and I was hoping we'd get to see them! And, on the way home, we did! A whole bunch of them were grazing not too far from the highway. That was fun to see. 

The road gets a lot worse once you turn off at the "Geode Beds" sign (or "Grode Bed Road," as our GPS called it), but it was nothing our van and the intrepid Sam couldn't handle. I think any regular car would have been totally fine up to that point, but if you were coming here in a non-high-clearance vehicle I think it would be smart just to leave it at the entrance and hike in. (Which might be a little bit of a pain, because you have to go quite a long way in, and then you'd be carrying your buckets of rocks back out with you, but there were a lot of holes and dips in the road that made me nervous even in the van!) It was fine for us, though, and there are several branching and intersecting roads, so maybe you could find a gentler route if you searched a bit.

I had found a map with someone's suggested coordinates of a good spot to start hunting, so we drove into that area and unloaded our stuff: shovels, rock hammers, a pick, gloves, goggles, and buckets. Right when we got out of the car we saw lots of sparkly broken geodes everywhere—rocks other people had broken open and left there, I suppose. They were so pretty, and the little ones would have been totally happy just picking up those the whole time!

Right away, Abe saw a tarantula and called us all over to see. (I like spiders, as do we all. Ziggy likes them A LOT and has even made up his own version of what they "say": "Poh, poh, poh.")(Because what good is an animal if you can't make the noise it makes?)(Though I have no idea where he got "poh, poh, poh.") This was such a big tarantula and it was cool to see it just crawling around in the wild here!

The digging was tricky and a little frustrating at first, because we didn't know exactly what we were looking for, or where we should be looking. You're supposed to dig down a bit to find the layer where most of the geodes are, but there are also some big pits where excavators have dug down quite deep, so you can climb into those and find good spots in the walls of the pits. Somewhere I'd read that you should look for pinkish and yellowish clay, with kind of a cookie-dough-like texture. We did find some pockets of that, and we did find some roundish rocks, but mostly the best stuff we were finding was still in fragments. The soil isn't TOO hard, but it still takes effort to dig down very far. And of course Sam and I were constantly trying to keep Ziggy from falling into holes, and mediating disputes about who got to use the rock hammers. So we didn't feel we were really maximizing our finding potential.

Still, with some effort, we started digging up rocks we were pretty sure were geodes. They were round and relatively light, and when we started breaking them open they had beautiful crystals inside! So that was exciting. I was yelled for urgently to "come see this, Mommy!" approximately 500 million times.

We were thinking we'd save some geodes intact, so we could take them home and get them cut open neatly at a rock shop, but the kids had a really hard time not wanting to just smash them open right then so they could see what was inside! So, they mostly just smashed away. And it WAS amazing to see how different each one was; each a tiny treasure box holding something new inside. There were all kinds of colors and textures and crystals. All beautiful.

Volcano Activities

We learned about volcanoes (briefly) and did the usual activities. Of course, my kids love volcanoes—who doesn't? We didn't go as in-depth as we sometimes have, but we covered all the basic types of volcanoes and how they are formed. (Above you see a cinder cone…made by blowing sugar into the air with a straw and letting it settle into a cone shape).

My very favorite thing was going to see this IMAX movie about volcanoes. If you ever get a chance to see it, make sure you take the chance! It was so cool! You feel like you are IN a volcano, or walking around one—which I have always wanted to do. And this wasn't even dangerous. :)

Vinegar and baking soda volcano

Rice crispie stratovolcano—alternating layers of cinders and pahoehoe lava (rice crispie mix) and liquid a'a lava (melted chocolate chips).

This must have been a very explosive eruption!

Crystal-Growing Activities

For years now I've been wanting to repeat this activity because it's just SO COOL. But I've also been nervous because it's a little tricky to get right. Sometimes it doesn't work and then you have to patiently boil down the solution and try again. We did need to do that a couple of times, but it was so worth it! 

A couple weird stages our hot ice went through when we overheated it or crystallized it accidentally. It's okay. You can always melt it down, add a little more vinegar, and try again.

Unfortunately, the video tutorial for making hot ice which we watched last time was no longer online, but I kind of remembered what to do, and we watched this video to refresh our memories on the details. I also explain the process in my earlier blog post about it.

Crystals are a great lead-in to talking about the relationship between temperature and pressure (you can also talk about this with respect to geysers). This video is cool, about how a pressure cooker or Instant Pot works. The same principle applies deep inside the earth, and allows water to become superheated or supersaturated with mineral solvents.

Another activity I've always wanted to do is growing a crystal from a seed crystal. It is pretty easy. First, you just grow some small alum crystals, and then pick one of them and suspend it in the supersaturated alum solution. It is all outlined in this tutorial. 

Here are the small alum crystals. They're so pretty--like ice that doesn't melt, or like little diamonds. My children loved playing with them.

We picked out a nice biggish one to serve as our seed crystal. Then we suspended it with fishing line in the alum solution, like this:

We watched it for several days, and it grew a little each day. It was really cool! When we finally took it out of the solution, it was so big and beautiful! Here it is:

We loved the flat faces it developed—like a diamond!

We learned about how crystals grow bigger when left to grow slowly and undisturbed (intrusive vs extrusive mineral growth). Here's an example: we grew salt crystals on two pieces of cardboard (you just soak the cardboard in a supersaturated salt water solution). (See also here.) One was left outside to dry/crystallize in the sun and wind, and one was protected inside a warm oven. You can see the one that grew slower (on the right in this picture) had much bigger crystals! This is like what happens with basalt vs. granite.

Close up of those salt crystals on the right—I love how nicely cubic they are!

And here are some under a microscope. Beautiful!

Looking at crystals under a microscope is such an interesting thing to do. They become even more beautiful when you put a polarizing filter over your eyepiece so you can see the colors (birefringence). You can learn more about this and find instructions here.

These are citric acid crystals

Epsom salt crystals

And sugar crystals.

Epsom salt crystals, not under the microscope. You can learn how to grow these here or here. They grow really fast!

Another example of "intrusive" and "extrusive" crystal growth, this time with sugar. Instructions for this experiment are here, and you can learn more about the process in geology here. 

Here is the hot sugar solution while it's still cooling—you can see the surface has cooled more quickly than what's underneath, forming these cool surface wrinkles. Sometimes pahoehoe lava has wrinkles like this too!

And here we have the smoother, small extrusive crystals on the left, and the bigger intrusive ones on the right.

You can also make melted sugar that cools so quickly, it doesn't have time to form crystals at all! This is similar to obsidian. You can learn how to do that here. It is so pretty! And the children love to break off pieces and eat it. :)

Crystals are so cool. Find more crystal-growing activities here!

Landforms, Glaciers, and Erosion

We were lucky this year because we got to take the best Geology Field Trip ever—to the Canadian Rockies! We went to Banff and Jasper National Parks. It was amazing! You can read more about our trip here, but I'm including a few pictures of the mountains and glaciers we saw.

Below, you can read about a few activities we did to learn about these principles when we got back from our trip.

These glaciers were amazing to see! I love the blue tones of the ice as it gets thicker.

This is Athabasca Glacier—you can walk right up onto this one.

Gorgeous turquoise glacial lake

Perfect example of a glacial U-shaped valley!

One day we made play-dough (this is my favorite recipe) and the children made all the different kinds of landforms we'd been learning about: mountains, glaciers, moraines, volcanoes, and so forth.

A cave!

Fold mountain

A volcanic mountain range (from a hot spot). And I think there are some hoodoos in there too.

Teddy, very serious about his fold mountain…

and his sinkhole!

Fault-block and tectonic plate collision mountains

While in Canada, we stayed at a house by a river and found some beautiful river rocks.

They were already so smooth and flat and pretty! We collected a few…

And took them home to polish in our rock tumbler!

Didn't they turn out beautifully?

Another fun way to make landforms in with sand in a cake pan—then you pour water in to make deltas, rivers, lakes, etc. More pictures and ideas here.

Another activity we did was making some big blocks of ice and then experimenting with them on a nearby hill. We learned about glacial till, terminal and lateral moraines, cirques, glacial striations, etc. And, we had fun sliding down the hill on our ice blocks! :)

You can find more glacier activities here. And even more here.