Insect Mouthparts Activity

Several of the books I got from the library suggested ways to demonstrate different types of insect mouthparts. I may have combined some ideas from those books, but I think I mostly followed this lesson plan here for this activity. There are some other good lesson plan ideas about Insects at this same site, too.

This activity demonstrates two important principles: how the different parts of a plant or flower can benefit different insects so that nothing is wasted, and how each insect has a mouthpart adapted to the specific types of food it eats. More details are in the pdf, but we demonstrated fly mouthparts, butterfly probosces, dragonfly mandibles, mosquito probosces, and leaf-cutter ant jaws. Everyone liked it QUITE a lot!

We also did this worksheet, which was provided at the .pdf link above, except I changed it around to make it a matching game. Feel free to use it. (The original worksheet just lists the insects and their respective foods and mouthparts; here they're mixed up so you have to draw lines to match the correct ones together.)

Parts of an Airplane

Sebastian always loves to draw and label things. (He spent his free time drawing this hyper-accurate plane mural one day.) He knows the parts of a plane far better than I do. But, for the benefit of the rest of us, we spent a day learning about the control surfaces of an airplane. I will never again be bored when I have to sit looking out the window at the wing of a plane! There are lots of interesting things going on on those wings! :)

This site shows how to make a paper glider that uses flaps and elevators to move in different ways. It's a good hands-on way to experiment with how and why these surfaces affect the plane the way they do.

Here's Abe giving a brief demonstration of that.

Here is a worksheet for filling in the parts of an airplane, and what they do.

And here is the answer key for that worksheet.

Endocrine System

We started the unit off with the Endocrine System, since hormones are such an important part of pregnancy and the menstrual cycle. I drew this picture the first day and then we had these horrible Endocrine people leering at us from the window for the whole unit. (The boys made me draw a balloon above the boy's head to explain why his hair was sticking up so much.) I accidentally left this picture up even when the babysitter came over one day. I hope she wasn't too traumatized by it.

From this lesson plan, I got the idea of explaining how hormones work using acid and base reactions (It's on pages 7-8 of this .pdf file). You just use purple cabbage juice as an indicator and drip different acids and bases into it. You explain that squeezing the cotton ball is like releasing a hormone into the bloodstream. As the hormone reaches different organs, it causes them to secrete other hormones or to perform in specific ways, just as each acid or base causes the cabbage juice to change to a different color. It seemed like a nice simple way to teach that somewhat abstract concept.

Plain cabbage juice

With various solutions added (baking soda, bleach, lemon juice, vinegar, etc)

This site is a good one for looking at different body systems---you can view the body in 3D and rotate it all different directions, as well as limit your view by system or body area. Very interesting and useful.

We also filled in this worksheet I found online---it has a copyright on it but it's only through 2001, so hopefully it's okay to use. Although I could certainly have used my own scary endocrine people above to make my own worksheet! :)

This video on ovulation and the menstrual cycle was good, and the boys found the animations very interesting.

Nuclear Power Plant worksheet

I think you should be able to print these out if you download the images. (Originally from here.) Just make sure you print them both at the same scale so the labels are the right size for the blank spaces. (Oh, and the answers are here.)

This was a fun worksheet for the children to fill out. Because we'd spent so much time talking about it, and had read so many books showing similar diagrams, even Malachi was able to tell me which label went where, once I read him what they said.

Daisy enjoyed doing hers too, as you can see:

Seb is in his element here. He LOVES diagrams and if I don't provide him with any, he draws his own.