Human Anatomy and Physiology Week 1 - Cells

This year I am tackling our subjects a little different than we normally do.  We are going to do one subject a month. The children will still do Bible daily and math a few times a week but everything else is going to be done in units.

For the month of September we decided to start with Science. 

We started with the history of medicine, from the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks and some famous philosophers including Aristotle. We read about different scientist from the past that discovered new things and how as time went on new scientists would uncover errors and find new information. We talk about how God's laws points us to health and than even before science figured out something God knew all along. The example of wine being used to clean wounds, in the story of the good Samaritan was well before science figured it out. 

  Our first experiment was using water as an magnifying glass.  We used a dropper and a glass slide.
When you  place a drop of water on the slide right above the word you can read the word larger through the water.

We made an edible cell to show the part we have been learning. Different candies represented different parts like the mitochondria, lysosomes, Golgi body, endoplamic reciculum, ribosomes, centrioles, and the nucleus.

 How to:

1. Mix the Jell-o  according to the package and the add one package of Knox gelatine.

drop a few of your candies in.

Let your Jell-o mixture (the cytoplasm) harden for several hours

Once the cytoplasm  is hardened use a sharp knife to cut out small pieces of Jell-o where each organelle will go.

Once you are finished placing your organelles into the cytoplasm, carefully turn the bowl over.

                                          They turn out pretty fantastic!

Presley's cell

  Natalie (grade 7) and Presley (grade 5) each drew out there own cell membrane adding everyday each part that makes up the cell.

They also took sometime to take notes of different facts they are learning, including things inside the nucleus, DNA and RNA. This was really helpful for them to understand what the term "Genetic testing" means since it is something often talked about at home.

Natalie's notes

                                      Then of course a bible verse penmanship and copy work.
They have a couple other things on the go for this unit but it builds on to the next so we will wait to show them until they are done.

Presley's copy work