Right now we are reading/using The World in a Drop of Water: Exploring with a Microscope. It is a very good book, full of good photos and illustrations, easy to read and understand. For the hands-on aspect, we've collected water samples from various sources, to look for microscopic life, of which we have found plenty.
While I was at class the other night, M stepped up to the plate - he and the kids used an eye dropper to collect water samples from a couple of old buckets out in the backyard. They examined them under the microscope. The kids drew pictures of what they saw, and The Boy labeled his extensively - I'll scan the drawings in and put them up in tomorrow's weekly report. When I came home and saw what they had done, I was delighted! M had so much fun that he has volunteered to take over the bulk of the hands-on part of science, which helps me immensely.
Other books I am looking at to continue our biological investigations include:
A study of insects, invertebrates, soil, plant life, and much more!
This book would, I think, be great for a dissection unit - as we were originally going to follow an actual biology curriculum for the year, I happen to have loads of dissection materials at hand. I'm going to get this from the library and see if it will work for us!
I've owned this book for years. We have started projects out of it a couple of times, but I would like to actually build the entire body this time!
And doesn't these books look like fun?
Other topics I would like to cover include mushrooms/fungi, lichens and mosses, seeds, leaves, possibly mammals, etc., so I will be looking for good books on those topics as well. Any suggestions?
I love this list of science resources. Please consider adding it to "Look! What We Did!" This is a website dedicated to creating resources for home school moms. -Savannah http://lookwhatwedid-homeschool.blogspot.com
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