Category: Apologia

Astronomy-Earth Ornament

12/16/2016

This was a SUPER EASY Ornament Craft we put together for a fun Christmas time activity during our Astronomy Studies. Though this could be easily made at any time of the year or even during an Earth Day Lesson or a Unit on the Earth, we fit ours in at the holiday season.

**The kids really enjoyed making these. Another fun idea to go along with the Earth Ornament, is you could make one for each Planet you study and hang them up as a sort of Solar System display.**

We actually used those Round Coca-Cola Ornament Bottles they sell at Christmas time.

The kids were SOOOO upset to have to drink all the coke so they could have an empty round bottle to use for their ornament, haha (ya, not really).

This variety of paints was nice to have on hand.

Even though we only used Blue, Green, and White for this Craft, we had many opportunities throughout the Astronomy unit to use many of the other colors.

Supplies Needed:

Round Ornaments (1 per student)
Ornament String
Ribbon (for a bow if desired)
Blue, White, Green (other colors if desired)
Paint Brush
Black Sharpie

Here are the steps:

Fill Clear Ornament with a little bit of BLUE paint. Place lid firmly back on or cover with your thumb for loose fitting lids. Shake well to make sure the blue paint is distributed evenly on the inside of the bottle. (you can even add glitter if you'd like)
Next, We drew outlines of the continents on the outside of the ornament with a BLACK SHARPIE.
We placed ornament string in the loop at the top (or tied around the lid of the pop bottle tightly in our case).
The kids then took a paintbrush and green and white paint and filled in the continent outlines.
Let ornament dry. We hung ours up by the strings.
Once it was dry, we tied a nice bow around the top with some "Christmas-y" Ribbon.

ENJOY YOUR EARTH ORNAMENTS
& MANY BLESSINGS!

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Sea Creatures-Mollusks

11/7/2016

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Chapter 9 was all about MOLLUSKS. Mollusks are soft slimy creatures with squishy bodies. Snails and slugs are mollusks we find in our yards! The kids thought it was fascinating that mollusks MAKE their shells! When we study Hermit Crabs, we learned that they live in the shells make by these Mollusks.

Mollusks are broken down into 3 GROUPS:

Gastropods-these are snails that usually live inside a shell! They make a variety of shells in different shapes and colors. The study of shells is known as CONCHOLOGY! (except for the Nudibranch...these gastropods don't make shells at all but are very beautiful. They have many colors that glow int he dark with bioluminescents! So Amazing!
Bivalves-These Mollusks have 2 shell halves. Mussels, scallops, and clams are examples of bivalves.
Cephalopods-We'll study these in Chapter 10!

WEEK 1:

For Week one, we worked on our Notepage after reading the first half of the chapter prior to class. We passed around a variety of Mollusk shells for the kids to examine.

We then began our folder activity page. The kids matched up a variety of shells with a picture of each and a description to make a flap book of Mollusk shells.

WEEK 2:

We began this week by filling out our 2nd notebook page on Mollusks. I passed out these paper rulers from Printable-Ruler.net and the kids were able to measure the rings on each shell they were passed and decide how old the shell was.

Growth lines on Mollusks indicate age similar to the growth rings in trees. As the Mollusk grows, it builds another layer on to of the other layer, leaving rings.

This shells shows growth lines indicating the Mollusk is 3 years of age.

Lots and lots of shells for this chapter! It was fun sorting through them all and trying to figure out what kind of Mollusk it was and then how old we thought it was. Having a nice variety is really helpful!

Since we don't live by the ocean, we asked families within the co-op and found many willing to bring in shells to share with our class for observation and our Conchology Research. We had about 3 gallon sized bags full of different shells and a bunch of large ones. It was nice having the large Conch Shells & listening for the ocean!

It was really fun to also see the many shells with holes in them that the kids all immediately said were eaten by a predator. Some predators will drill holes in the shells to eat Mollusks.

There are some neat videos on youtube on Mollusks!

Happy Homeschooling!

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Apologia: Exploring Creation with Zoology 3-Land Creatures

11/3/2016

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Well! We finished up Sea Creatures last year and are moving on to Land Creatures! We just LOVE Apologia Science! I still have a few chapters left to add for the Sea Creatures study but I wanted to go ahead and show you our set up for this year's classes.

We set up our lesson in a very similar format to the Research Notebooking Journal we used for Sea Creatures. We used a larger binder this year since our binder last year filled up super fast. We purchased a 1 1/2" binder to hold all the file folders, notebooking pages and activities. There is one colored file folder for each chapter. Check out our YouTube Video on how we put our research notebook together!

We tried to break up each chapter over a 2 week period since we studied this subject at our homeschool co-op. Grades 1st through 4th had this class (each were taught separately by grade).
**Click on our weekly reading schedule to the right to see how we divided up our chapters.**

I am teaching the 4th graders since my daughter is in this class. :) I taught them last year for sea creatures too.
A great group of kids!

The lessons were designed and planned out by a group of talented teachers. I can add my own twist and supplemental activities to mold the lessons to my class though.

It is such a GREAT book to teach!!

Some handy items to have on hand would be: Map of the world (for animal tracking), stickers of a variety of land mammals throughout the world, and mammals of North America (or one for your continent) Field Guide.

**There are some great stickers included in the
Apologia Student Notebooks you can use for tracking on your world maps**

We also placed a Map of Each Continent on our classroom wall.

As we go about each chapter, we'll add animals found in those areas to our maps! I got this fun idea from this site. She provides some fun Land Animals additions to your study. Check them out:

You can print out colored land animal pictures right from this site and even a classification table. It was super helpful!

We used our Map book to print out our continent maps but she also includes links to websites where you can print out free outline maps.

http://amzn.to/2fIxvqX

We thought these items looked fun for designing our own Field Guides this year on Animal Tracks! We'll post once we complete this activity!

Come back soon to check out our
week-to-week lessons and activities!

Happy Homeschooling!!

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Apologia Science-Primeval Reptiles

11/24/2015

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We completed our Chapter 5 Research Journal page in class.

We spent one week on Primeval Reptiles and had so much fun! It was very interesting to learn about the discoveries of these great creatures God created long ago and that we are unable to see with our own eyes today. This is where science comes in...even though we don't know much about them, we can make educated "guesses" on what we think they may have looked like based on evidence found from their fossils! Fascinating!

We learn much from the Bible on these as well! The Leviathan, for instance, is mentioned in the Old Testament a few times so we also read up on that. God's Word is filled with so much science! (check out Job 41 & Psalm 104) The GREAT DELUGE was a big part of our lesson to explain why these reptile's fossils have been found in weird locations like the desert and on top of mountains. Apologia does an incredible job explaining this for the kids to understand and they were filled with complete enthusiasm on this topic.

Here is our "match up" game...mine is the answer key so this one is not cut up but this is what the kids would look like if they matched them properly.

We talked about the 4 main "saurs":
Nothosaurs-"spurious lizard"

Means "Spurious Lizard"
Long neck & tail with 4 webbed feet
They can walk on land and swim
Eggs hatch on land (like a turtle)
The Lariosaurus is one type-these were thought to be around 2 ft. long.
They can range in size from 2 ft up to 20 ft.

Plesiosaurs

Long necks and turtle shaped body with no shell
Probably ovovivaparous
They had 4 flippers and up to 24 different bones in each finger!
The Elasmosaurus and Pliosaurs were a type of Plesiosaur.

Mosasaurs

These resemble sea snakes: tiny flippers and paddle shaped tails
They can range from 10 ft. up to 50 ft. long
Swallow prey whole (unhinged jaw)

Ichthyosaurs

Means "Fish Lizard"
Looks like a large fish but with a lizard skeleton
Shonisaurs were a type of Ichthyosaur

We ended our lesson by talking about what "articulated" means and how sediment can help preserve some fossils! The students each took a ball of Crayola Air Dry Clay and also one of the small sea creatures. We found that the lobster, sea horse, crab and the swordfish made AWESOME imprints. We also used plastic dinosaurs to make footprints and seashells for our fossils. We let them dry for the week and then attached these wooden tag keychains to each one (don't forget to make holes in the clay BEFORE it air dries though).

To finish them off, we printed these clear labels for each keychain!
The kids LOVE these and they were fun to make.

Here are some of the products we used for this project! We already had the plastic sea creatures from back when we made the ocean zone bottles! Click here to go to the Ocean Zone Bottle Youtube video!

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Science-Apologia Astronomy

11/11/2015

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God's Glory is so magnificent when we just look up to the sky...and what we see isn't even a fraction of His great Creation. I signed up to teach the 6th Grade Apologia Astronomy class at our homeschool co-op last year and I was super intimidated. There is so much about Astronomy that I do NOT know, but this curriculum is so thorough that I instantly got excited about it once I started reading!

So to get ready, I started collecting some books and other items that would be helpful for the class. Typing up a syllabus (that I probably changed weekly) was nice to have a "guideline" to help me through too! I will upload a copy of that as well to give you a general idea of what was planned out for the class. There are just SO many fun ideas out there in internet land!

Now, I LOVE hands-on...probably the 3rd grade teacher in me from back in my teaching days prior to homeschooling or else, it's just more FUN homeschooling or in a classroom!!! So we did do a lot of notebooking activities, flapbooks, and diagrams...plus volcanoes, rockets, and a solar system poster board! Oh...we can't forget our Rover Races! Those were SUPER fun! An activity we got from NASA itself!

Space Station at Carnegie Science Center

Solar System Poster

Mentos & Coke Bottle Rocket

Visiting our local Planetarium

Astronaut Ice Cream

Venus Volcanos

Here are some fun "extras" to add to your Astronomy Study!

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Science-Sea Creatures Part 2: Student Research Notebook

11/8/2015

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The notebooking we chose to use for our Apologia Science class was a combination of many ideas. I do use the Apologia Notebook from time to time but for our main research, we created our own using colored file folders, our own notebooking pages and a 1-inch 3-ring binder.

The cover page was one we created for the kids to personalized themselves. They had a fun time coloring them during our co-op class. We are currently in the process of teaching and making these pages for our research. We have most of them complete but once all of them are finished, we will make them available to our viewers, so stay tuned!

You will need:

1", 3-ring binder
13 colored file folders with chapter name labels
Cover page
Research Sheets
hole punch
Folder Activities (downloads coming soon)

Click HERE to watch the video or click on the video above to see how to make our
Research Journal for the Sea Creatures Class!

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Science-Sea Creatures Part 1

11/1/2015

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Science can be a bit scary to teach but it can be so fascinating! For science, we use Apologia! We've used this curriculum since we began homeschooling and it is excellent! Jeannie Fulbright does just an incredible and thorough job with both the outline and the presentation of the curriculum. There are many different "helps" to assist in the class whether its a journaling notebook, lapbook, experiments or just using "Pinterest" for ideas from other families!

Here is the textbook and Journal we use:

Apologia Science is one of the main academic classes we have at our local homeschool co-op. In the past at the co-op, we've used Botany, Astronomy, Zoology, Physical Science and we just keep coming back to it...because it is fantastic! I love that it is written so well and has the "Creation Confirmation" inserts throughout to assure the kids about how Amazing and Intelligent our Creator is. He carefully and precisely made each and every animal.
(some of them are crazy cool too...I especially love those cute manatees)

~This year, grades 1-4 are using Zoology 2: Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day, 5-6th are using
Human Anatomy and Physiology, 7th is using General Science and 8th and up are using Biology.~

I am teaching the 3rd Graders Zoology 2 Sea Creatures and it is so fun! I team up with the 2nd and 4th grade teachers (who are super creative and gifted I might add) to put together a fantastic syllabus to follow for the 27 weeks of classes we have. We cover approximately 1 chapter over a 2 week period (so just 2 classes per chapter since we only meet on Fridays) with minimal homework for the kids to do at home. Our classes are PACKED full of fun!

But first, before the amazing study of sea creatures can begin, it's helpful to start collecting fun resources to use during the year.

Here are some books we've collected (using library books are great too...and FREE):

And other neat and fun resources, prizes, and fun class activities. Below is a Melissa and Doug floor puzzle (link is located at the bottom of this post) I found at our local teacher supply store and an Ocean Adventure DVD which talks about the Nature of God and His magnificent design (we are super excited to watch this in the upcoming weeks).

We also collected various stuffed animals, small plastic sea creature figures (we found them on Amazon...check out the link at the bottom of the page) and some super neat stickers that we've used in lots of our class folder activities.

Stay tuned for part 2 and part 3 of Sea Creatures Science where I'll go more in-depth on our class research notebook, folder activities, chapter 1 bottle craft, our walrus craft, and TADPOLES!