Mad Scientists

I've taken one chemistry class in my life - chem 1 honors as a sophomore in high school, which was about 20 years ago.  I didn't understand it very well then and barely scraped by thanks to a good lab partner and friends in class, and maybe a teacher who didn't really read our lab sheets and assignments that we turned in.  It's not that I didn't want to understand it... it was so mathematical and of course, I may not have been paying close attention as I was busy "texting" my friends the way we 30somethings did back in the day:  passing our TI-81 graphic calculators back and forth!  Remember that?!

Or playing Tetris, of course.

But I digress.  My teacher started day 1 (and I can't beleive I remember this) by saying that the class could be one of three things:  

che-mystery

che-misery

or

chemistry

Clearly it was more mystery to me and I vaguely remember anything other than the fact that fast food ketchup and taco sauce packets can make your pennies clean because of the vinegar content.

So here I am teaching my little children chemistry for the first time.  Homeschooling is SO redeeming... I love getting to relearn everything over again and have even more apprecation for the different disciplines and the complexity of the world God created.

We started chemistry this "semester" with Cycle 3 of Classical Conversations.  We'll only spend 6 weeks memorizing definitions at CC, but I went ahead and bought the chem book in the science science series we've been using the last few years - the "Christian Kids Explore..." books from Bright Ideas Press.  I love that I can read a short lesson to them with all the terms/definitions they need to know and also have a hands-on activity right at my fingertips if I want it.  I think we'll keep going with it for the rest of the school year.  Since they boys are just young elementary schoolers, it's only necessary they learn super basic stuff, although we will end up memorizing a few definitions and the first 12 elements of the periodic table by the end of the quarter at CC.  

What's more important to me is that we get to do some fun, hands-on stuff because that's where the magic happens!  Last week we did a handful of experiments from the chemistry section of the book we use at CC - VanCleave's 201 Awesome, Magical, Bizarre, and Incredible Experiments.  It just requires basic kitchen ingredients and we had fun making things bubble and turn colors and learning why it works. 

Today we read the lesson on elements from CKE Chemistry to go along with this week's CC memory work, and then I pulled out a chemistry kit that we inherited from some friends who were cleaning out their collection of learning activities their kids had outgrown.  JACKPOT!  It's been sitting in a closet for over a year now and I have been so excited to get it out and use it.

In general, the experiments are a bit over Ben and Joey's heads as far as terms, explanations, etc.  But it is really fun to mix up the different materials and see what happens.  Nothing in the box is very dangerous, but we got a whole collection of safety goggles for Christmas and it's good to teach them lab safety, right?!!  And they looked so cute.

In this one we mixed up some water, diswashing detergent, sodium bicarbonate, and citric acid.  We had to determine just the right amount to let the bubbles come to the top but not spill over.  After our 3rd attempt, we got it!  More sodium bicarbonate and citric acid, less dish detergent.

Thanks for stopping by our lah-bore-atory (you know, mad scientist speak) and maybe we'll have more pictures next week!  The boys are really hoping we get to blow stuff up...