School Takes A Bit of a New Direction

In an attempt to help my boys, especially Luke, enjoy learning I have been looking towards a more hands-on approach. I'm not giving up on books, but looking to supplement with more things to DO. I still read to them and require reading but Luke is really good with his hands and I want to capture some of that before his school days are over. I am looking for ways to fulfill his high school credits without heavily relying on lots of reading.



I can't remember where I found this series recommended for high school but I am looking at these for Luke's biology credit. We have all of these titles: Prairies, Fields and Meadows, Woods and Forests, Rivers and Streams, Lakes, Ponds and Temporary Pools, and Wetlands. It amazes me that we have all five of these habitats on our 26 acres! There is lots of real field work in these little books. There is also quite a bit of equipment to put together, which will require some gathering on my part, but if it is something he enjoys and learns from then it will be worth it.

Timberdoodle is a great supplier of hands-on types of things. This past week we pulled out our

Some Body game and started playing with it.

Recently I purchased My Senses kit & Genetics & DNA kit and we just got them in the mail yesterday. I'm really looking forward to having fun together with these.

The My Senses kit includes fifty experiments including making a stink bomb, a model of the mouth and tongue, a simple telephone, a hearing aid, a telescope and also experiments that test taste buds, confuse your sense of touch, see how sound vibrates and much more. Along with reading some books on the human body, I am hoping to make notebook pages with illustrations and photos of our projects.

With the genetics kit:

"Your child will isolate the tomato DNA in a test tube, discover dominant and recessive genes, learn how chromosomes are combined, and much more. The kit assumes some basic understanding of reproduction. The children will build a model to see the double-stranded helical structure of DNA and investigate DNA evidence to identify suspects and solve a crime. They will even breed bacteria to experiment with genetic engineering."

Doesn't that sound like fun?