Science Saturday: Chemistry & Physics and this week's science

Recently the crew did a review on an Apologia Science curriculum. I wasn't on that review because we already own the Human Anatomy and Physiology books, but it made me realize that I hadn't shared our science for this year at all, and since we are using a different Apologia title I thought I'd share what we are doing. We are using their Chemistry and Physics book for young explorers. I also have the notebooking journals to go with them. We really enjoy the Apologia books, and I'm pretty sure I have almost all of the young explorer series.

These books are packed with science experiments, so I knew it would be helpful to just buy the lab kit. I was able to purchase this with our charter funds. It has been great to have this because I can just grab the baggie for each lesson, and we don't have to go searching for all the material. It also makes the kids more excited to see all this stuff, they can't wait to get to all the experiments.

Here is one of the experiments we worked on this week. We are just getting into the elements, so one of the activities was to make atoms using candies for the protons and neutrons. They made 2 hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atom resulting in H2O.

Alex's H2O molecule

The candies came in the lab kit, and the kids really wanted to eat them for a long time, so we ate the leftovers. It was a very sweet science experiment.

Aric's molecule of water.

There are a lot of other activities in the notebooking journals like mini books. Here is Alex glueing in a mini book that he put together. There are also copywork pages, coloring pages, and science experiment recording pages. We always pull these out when we work on science.

Other science from the week:


Slime making seems to be a regular thing around here lately. We really like making this fluffy slime. It really feels amazing.

I even enjoy squishing it around. It doesn't stick to everything. Here are the video directions for making it.

Aaron (the middle schooler) doesn't really do science with us anymore. He has an online science that he's doing through the charter this year because he has one required online class that he has to do for the program that he's in. So, I chose to have him do science. Since he does science online, I really want him to have some more hands-on science to do because he finds it slightly boring to be doing science online.

He has a few different things he can do like a chemistry kit, building rockets, and other various youtube experiments. But, this week he got this with the last of his curriculum funds through the charter, a K'nex educational set DNA STEM building replication and transcription. He is doing a little bit of DNA stuff in his online science so I thought this would be a good fit. He loves K'nex too.

He started with the first project this week, a DNA strand. I believe the book has a few different projects to go through.

That's about all we did for science this week!