Time for a change

I have decided since I am such an erratic blogger to change this blog to cover any and all science I am teaching.  I am planning on teaching Biology again next year since my 13ds will be starting biology in the fall and Chemistry since the ds that just finished bio must move onward and upward.  I do want to recap this past year over the summer and I hope to post all the wonderful things we did as I plan out what we will be doing next year.

  It is a shame the year has come to an end.  It was fun and I look forward to next year. 

Someday I may have a load of awesome teaching tools to help others along the same path.  I am so thankful that my husband has allowed me to invest in the tools to teach science to these wonderful home school students. I hope to continue to provide more kids the opportunity to use a high- powered microscope and all the rest of the fancy tools and have a real love for the created order God put us here to watch over. 

Whether or not these kids go on to pursue a career in science or not I hope that they discover a deeper love for their Creator by discovering more about the world He made.

This is the cool moth we found. We are so excited. He is living in a fishtank, hence, the colored gravel, until we figured out who he is and let him go. We have discovered with a little help from Swagbucks that he is a Cecropia Moth - Hyalophora cecropia - male. The females have narrower less bushy antennae. He is a whopping 6 inches across. I guess it might be time to let him go find his soul mate and make cute caterpillars together. Look him up online the caterpillars are really awesome looking too. I am kinda sad we didn't find him when he looked like that.

Moth

This is the cool moth my son just found. It is a Cecropia Moth - Hyalophora cecropia -male or a Robin Moth. He is just shy of 6 inches across. We just don't have the heart to kill him and stick a pin through him so we are adding him to our internet collection .  OOPs..look for part 2 for the pic.

Our kick-off meeting

Yesterday we met for the first time to go over what the schedule and expectations for the year would be.  We reviewed note taking and outlines, KWO's (key word outlines), the OYO's (On your own ?'s) and study guides.  We quickly reviewed some other writing dress-ups and openers using LBS writing lessons 1 and 2 as our guide.  For homework the kids are  doing LBS lesson 3 but substituting pages 19 and 20 in their Apologia Bio book instead of the source text provided.  The assignment was given to gauge how well the students are acquainted with the IEW methodology.  If they have a tough time we will have to do spend  some class time reviewing with them, if it is easy we can forge ahead. We also set up a group on Bigtent.com to keep the communication flowing and to post schedules and assignments.   Next week we will tackle our first microscope lab and use some of our IEW summarizing techniques in our reports.