Potato Osmosis activity

We talked about semi-permeable membranes and how nutrients, oxygen, and other things pass from the capillaries to the cells, or the alveoli to the capillaries, by diffusion or osmosis. This simple activity demonstrates the effects of osmosis. You cut a potato in half and put half of it in plain water and the other half in salt water. Then wait a few hours. (Put the cut side facing down; this picture shows it after we'd already turned it back over.) 

(White dish) Because there is a lower concentration of water in the salt water (the salt is "taking up" some of the space), the water in the potato cells moves out via osmosis. That makes the cells "floppy" or flaccid, since they have lost some of their water. You can feel that the potato is squishy and limp.

(Clear dish) The potato in the plain water stays firm and crisp. Because the concentration of water on the outside of the potato (in the dish) is the same as the concentration on the inside (in the cells), no osmosis occurs, and the cells stay firm and maintain their shape.

For another explanation of this, see here.

Lung and Diaphragm Model

Here you see Malachi, looking thrilled (ha ha--this is actually his serious scientist face) demonstrating the balloon lung model. As you pull down on the "diaphragm" (bottom balloon), the air pressure changes in the chest cavity (bottle chamber), causing the lung (top balloon) to inflate with air. It's actually pretty cool to watch it working! Here are further instructions.

Heart Cookies

Not sure there is much to say about this. We made heart cookies. The little kids just used regular-shaped hearts and frosted them in sections with purple (unoxygenated blood) and pink (oxygenated blood) to show how blood flows through the heart. They had to show me the four chambers and describe the path of the circulation. (These cookies aren't pictured—the hearts below were just our leftovers!) Abe actually tried to shape his cookie into a real heart shape, though, and show the valves and the septum and so forth. I loved the way his cookie turned out!

Here are some other edible heart models you could make with graham crackers.

Blood Cells Under Microscope

After we did the blood typing activity we quickly smeared some of that nice blood onto a microscope slide so we could look at it! We have looked at blood cells before and they're very interesting, but it is harder than you think to get liquid blood! I've tried poking myself with a pin lots of times and I just can't get any blood (my survival instincts won't let me draw blood, I guess!). When I went to donate blood, I actually asked the nurse if I could have one of those little finger-pokers to use later, so I've got that one in reserve! But anyway, we already had some blood after blood-typing, so we leapt at the opportunity. :)

We're no experts in microscopy, so I'm not sure I can describe all the things we're seeing here, but you can definitely see those little flat/round cells! I am not sure if you can tell the red blood cells from the white? The white are bigger, we know. We thought we were picking out some differences but just weren't sure. And of course, my little iPhone photos don't really do justice to what we were seeing. It's hard to get in position a good picture without some sort of attachment for the phone!

We thought maybe that green triangle thing in the bottom left corner was a platelet?

And here is the blood as it was drying and starting to clot.

Blood typing activity

You know what's really fun? Testing your blood to find out what type it is. I already knew my blood type, but I wanted to do this activity anyway because its so fun smearing your blood around on the little test circle and seeing it clot (or not)! I highly recommend it.

And since none of the kids knew their blood types, it was extra fun to find them out! I ordered these blood typing kits from Amazon (the five-pack) and we would have happily used a couple more. They are very simple to use; just make sure you read the instructions and have everything set out and ready before you start.

I told the kids the finger-prick wouldn't hurt. And it didn't. But some of them were a bit offended by it anyway. (Here is Daisy pretending to be offended.) It did help to soak the fingers in warm water first so the blood would flow. Although with Abe, our first subject, the blood flowed a little TOO well and got everywhere! So we soaked the later kids for a little less time. You really don't need much blood. You don't need to saturate the entire circle with blood like they do for an infant PKU test. You just need enough to react with the antigen.

And here are the finished samples! Kind of fun to have them all collected on little cards like that.

Cardiovascular System Unit Study and Lesson Plan

This unit had a lot of content but very few pictures, for some reason. I do have a few other posts I will put up, but I'll link most of the videos and other content we used here.

Also, we combined a short treatment of the immune system with this unit, since the blood cells play such a big role. We talked about viruses and bacteria, and immune response. We may study that more fully in the future.

First and foremost, I MUST mention this group of videos that the children LOVED. At first they just thought the videos were silly. They kept saying things like, "Hey, the blood cells can't fly in little ships!" "Hey, germs don't say 'heh heh heh'!"—and so forth. But then the children caught the spirit of the thing and began to love the videos with a deep and abiding love. It seems like maybe the episodes are from a British TV program called "Once Upon a Time Life"? I'm not totally sure. There are other episodes that show other parts of the body, but we just focused on the applicable ones to this unit. We got to know and love all the characters quite a bit. The action is kind of slow but it's all part of the charm! As is the music. And the explanations are actually quite good.

Here are the episodes we watched (I'm just linking Part I of each episode, but parts 2 and 3 for each one should come up on the "other videos" menu at the right side of your screen. Or maybe you can just search online for "once upon a time life" and you'll find whole episodes somewhere. Each episode is about 30 minutes long).

Once Upon a Time Life: The Tiny Platelets

Once Upon a Time Life: The Vaccination

Once Upon a Time Life: The Heart

Once Upon a Time Life: The Blood

Once Upon a Time Life: Breathing

Other than these gems, we also liked:

this video on how the heart pumps blood

this, on how a wound heals itself

and this (annoying, but understandable) video about blood types

Here are instructions on how to make a simple stethoscope. This totally didn't work for us, but maybe it will for you! Luckily we had this stethoscope of our own and the children enjoyed listening to each others' hearts with it.

Here you can hear the sounds of various heart murmurs. It's amazing that doctors can hear and distinguish these!

Another thing that didn't work for us: this heart pump model with the four soda bottles. Maybe our bottles were too small? Anyway, there's a whole good lesson plan with it, so this page is definitely worth a look.

Another heart pump model we didn't try.

You can make this model of a drop of blood.

Cell vs. virus

Did you know even bacteria (in this case, e. coli) can get a virus?

Cool video of a white blood cell chasing bacteria

This interactive site helps you visualize the size of a red blood cell (among other things)

Of course it's always nice to compare healthy lungs to smokers' lungs:

here

and here

Interesting article on artificial hearts

I've always thought it was fascinating how heart cells can beat all by themselves, and then sync when they get in proximity to one another. You can see a video here.

For a field trip during this unit, I called the Red Cross to see if the children could come watch me donate blood. We set it up during a less-busy time of day, and they were really great to work with me and allow the children to be close by. Our nurse was great—explaining stuff to them, letting them feel my bag of blood, etc. I'm not very squeamish about it and I like donating blood, so I didn't mind. Of course, most of all, the children liked getting pretzels and juice afterwards (the nurse kindly said they could have some, even though THEY weren't the ones who did the donating!). :) You can find a place to donate blood on the Red Cross website.

And here's my Cardiovascular System Unit Pinterest page.

2000 Years in 12 Courses: A Clothing History Celebration

For our end-of-unit celebration, I decided we'd have a big feast, with one course representing each historical era we studied. As we ate each course, we reviewed the clothing styles for the corresponding era and talked about various political and social events that occurred during that time period. Each child chose an era to focus specifically on, and gave a little oral report about it. They each made a project to go along with their era, too. Some of us dressed up in "historical clothing" of one of the eras.

Here are the (fairly subjective—after all, it's hard to whittle down periods of tens or hundreds of years to just one or two characteristic foods! Still, these were all things that seemed representative to me!) foods we ate and the historical eras that went with them:

MENU

1. Classical world: Pita Bread, Olive Oil, Olives, Feta 

2. Middle Ages: Bacon, (Root) Beer 

3. French court (1600's): Melon (a favorite food of Louis IV) 

4. Age of Revolution (1700-1800): Tea (representing Boston Tea Party), Baguette (representing the Grain Riots in France) 

5. Regency/Victorian eras (1800-1900): Hot drinking chocolate, Shrewsbury Cakes

6. Edwardian era (1900-1910): Cucumber Sandwiches (as mentioned in "The Importance of Being Earnest")

7. World War I: Homemade Donuts (referencing the Salvation Army serving donuts to soldiers, who were called "doughboys") 

8. 1920s: Pointes d’asperges a la Mistinguette, a la Anatole (a food referenced in one of the Jeeves stories by P.G. Wodehouse—see the rest of the menu here). Could also have done Tapioca Pudding to reference "Thoroughly Modern Millie." 

9. 1930s-1940s: Fritos, Cheerioats (Fritos and Cheerios, called "Cheerioats," were first made in the 1930s) 

10. 1950s: Deviled Eggs, Jello 

11. 1960s:  Tunnel of Fudge Cake, Celery with Cream Cheese 

12. Modern Times: Fruit Smoothie, Salted Caramels

Daisy and Junie dressed up as beautiful Victorian ladies. Well, they were really trying to be ladies of the French Court, but the tutus they wore under my skirts looked more like crinolines than like farthingales or panniers. Still, at least they got the birds in their hair! :)

Abe gave a presentation about the Victorian Era. He wore a top hat and cravat. Very handsome.

Malachi talked about the 1920s. He wore a bowler hat and made a banjolele like Bertie Wooster's.

Seb talked about the 1950s and made a model cockpit of the 1952 Cessa 172 Skyhawk. As you can see, none of instruments are digital!

You may wonder if it is possible to eat 12 courses in one meal! It is difficult. But not impossible. The key is just having tiny bits of each thing. We loved it. (But I do wonder how in the world Louis XIV managed meals with forty-four courses, or equally preposterous numbers!)

This was such a fun celebration and a good review of all the historical eras we'd been studying. We hope to do it again someday! :)

Clothing and Identity; Costume Design

Throughout this unit, we talked a lot about clothing and identity: what clothing says about a person, what clothing doesn't say about a person, etc. That was one of the main things we wanted to convey to the children: that their clothing choices matter, but that dressing to fit in can also have drawbacks. And that wearing something that fits well and says what you want it to say—and wearing whatever you wear with confidence—is a lot more important than fitting in to someone else's arbitrary definition of "stylish." Sam and I felt like we would have been so much more empowered had we had that kind of perspective when we were young!

Sam taught a day on Costume Design, stressing how for costume designers, every clothing choice must reveal something about the character. We learn a lot more than we realize just by looking at how a character (or any person) is dressed!

Nutmeg was very happy while Sam was teaching. He kept hopping in circles around Sam's legs.

Finally Sam had to pet him.

Sam drew two character outlines and had the children draw in costumes to fit a specific character profile which he gave them. They had to justify how their clothing choices showed various aspects of that character's personality. It was fun to see what they came up with!

Malachi, Daisy, Malachi

Junie

Seb

Abe

Sam chose one of the designs (Malachi's) to paint over and make more realistic. I love how it turned out!

Clothing History: A Timeline through (my favorite) Movies

It was an interesting exercise for me to put the movies I love into some sort of historical order. I hadn't even really placed many of them in time at all, and seeing which ones overlapped and which were historically more precise was really quite fun! In addition, we don't really watch movies in our family very often (at least the children don't). We generally have family movie night once every couple months, and we started that tradition maybe 5 years ago, so even the older children have probably only seen movies numbering in the dozens. Thus, there are a LOT of my favorite movies I had yet to introduce them to and I knew everyone would feel this was a VERY special unit!

I'm sure lots of these movies aren't costumed with complete historical accuracy, but they were good enough for our purposes. My main objective was to find a movie I LIKED (and that was child-appropriate) for each period, not just one that was accurate. And I suppose there aren't all that many movies I really love. This list covers most of them. There are a few I had to just stick in there because I couldn't think of anything else (Hercules!) but even those are at least movies I think are okay.

For this Clothing Unit, we only picked ONE movie to watch from each time period (marked with a *), but I put down all the movies I thought of in case we do this again someday, or in case someone else wants other ideas. That Victorian Period really has a wealth of great movies, eh? And I hard time thinking of any 80's-era movies I loved. I'm sure there's something I'm forgetting. :)

American Girl Doll Clothing History Timeline

Here is something I made for Daisy. She has a doll—not American Girl brand, but the same size and style—which she loves to dress up, so we looked up all kinds of historical costumes that are available for those dolls (and even bought a few!). There are some amazing doll costumers. You can find very expensive, gorgeous historical reproductions on Etsy and cheaper period-style clothing from China on Ebay. I don't even know if it's worth putting up links because they are always changing, but it's easy to find beautiful things!

Anyway, I made this chart of American Girl dolls wearing clothing styles from the various eras. She loved it. And she's actually quite good, now, at pinpointing which eras various styles come from!

And here is Rosie (her doll) dressed in a few of her costumes:

Marie Antoinette :)

1920s

Junie's doll Violet wearing the Christian Dior "New Look"

Matching (Daisy put her sweater on backwards to make it match) :)

Weaving

After we learned about the fibers that make up different fabrics, we learned about how those fibers are spun and woven together to make fabrics. And of course, when learning about weaving, it is always fun to make paper baskets! These woven hearts are traditional decorations for Danish Christmas trees (my Danish grandmother had a whole tree full of lovely red and white ones) and, while they're slightly more complicated then just a regular double-sided woven paper mat, they aren't too hard. We had made them before so we were quite good at it! This template made them even easier.

After getting the hang of the basic "over-under-over-under" idea in weaving, we were ready to get a little more complicated. My friend let us borrow a tiny American Girl loom (I think it was for the Kirsten doll) that has a shuttle, beater, gears, and all the parts you need. That was really fun. We finally understood the warp and the weft and how the shuttle interacts with the threads to separate and lift them. Sebastian was probably the most persistent, but we all took turns weaving and making a couple of cute little woven doll sashes.

I can totally see why weaving is getting popular these days. It is really fun! Even on a doll-sized loom.

We also used my sari to demonstrate different ways that a length of woven fabric could be worn and tied and draped once it's made. There were a lot of draped styles in ancient times that didn't require sewing or much fastening at all!

Fibers and Textiles

Cotton?

I'm lucky enough to have a friend who spins and knits with all sorts of fibers, and she kindly let us look at several of her yarns under a microscope. Unfortunately, my notes on these pictures were a bit cryptic and I'm not sure I got them all right! I will write what I THINK they are, but you can see this page for more (and possibly more accurate) pictures of what various fibers look like at the microscopic level.

Silk?

Mohair?

Wool?

Linen (flax)?

I had a clothing and textiles class in college which was very interesting, and I had tons of fabric swatches from that, if only I could have found them! :) We raided all of our closets instead to find different fabric types, and visited a fabric store for more. The children were delighted to discover, among other things, that some of the boys' ties were "100% silk"! "We live like kings!" they said. :)

A Clothing History Timeline

During this unit, we put up a big timeline on the wall and wrote all kinds of things on it from other units we've had. Then we put up small pictures to show clothing from each period. That was really fun. Again, it helped us so much to visualize how the history of it all fit together! I love walking by this timeline on my way up the stairs every day and seeing the things that people have added to it. :)