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mellifera33

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Posts posted by mellifera33

  1. Handshakes were standard when I was a kid, then a new pastor came in and wanted to hug everyone as they exited the sanctuary. He went in for my dad and dad jumped back, shocked. Hugging was the standard at the church I attended when I was a young adult, and I got used to it, but it was a small church without anyone who was weird about it or creepy. At my current church, they offer buttons at the door indicating your personal space preference. It started after covid, but I think it's a great idea at any time.

  2.  

    2 hours ago, LostintheCosmos said:

     

    However, there are ways of teaching Latin that approach it more like how we teach modern languages, and I think these can be appropriate for younger children. But there are not the same number of easy-to-use resources available to homeschoolers to support that approach. The new program from UD that I linked to is one, the most complete that I have seen and also totally scripted, which is why I am very excited about it. There are additional optional grammar lessons with it, but you don't have to use those and I do not with my elementary aged students. No one here gets formal Latin grammar instruction until 6th grade. 

    I Speak Latin by Drew Campbell is another example of this type of program. 

    • Like 1
  3. Last year I led biology labs at my co-op. We only did two dissections, and kids could opt out or construct a paper dissection model. This book is an excellent resource for lab ideas, and we used it for more than half of our labs. Our schedule:

    1. Lab safety, measurement, using a microscope

    2. Detecting carbohydrates and fats in foods

    3. Detecting proteins in foods

    4. pH-serial dilutions, effects of buffers, finding pH of household items

    5. Mounting specimens for observation under a microscope

    6. Staining specimens--simple stains and gram staining

    7. Plant pigment chromatography using prepared extractions from summer and autumn leaves

    8. Cell cycle, observing onion root cells in various stages of mitosis

    9. Extracting DNA from strawberries

    10. Building a monster using coin-flips to select alleles for each trait, and determining phenotype based on dominance.

    11. Forensics activity--matching DNA to determine the criminal

    12. Classification, using dichotomous keys to identify insects

    13. Observing and identifying protists

    14. Dissecting flowers

    15. Constructing an insect dissection model

    16. Constructing a frog dissection model

    (optional: dissecting a grasshopper and a frog)

    17. Succession activity, looking at a local example of succession after a natural disaster

    18. Outdoor activity: looking at plant diversity in the small city lot next to the co-op site. 

    Some planned labs were unable to be completed due to snow days and illness, and some were changed due to time constraints. We didn't look at fungi, complete an activity on competition and natural selection, or go deeper into ecology. Such is life. 🙂

     

     

     

     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
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  4. 2 hours ago, EKS said:

    So why do they call out evolution specifically?

    Not OP, but I think this is for a few reasons. I think the biggest is that evolution in particular has become the "big issue" in the science vs. religion debate that somehow became so prominent in evangelical culture. It's become the buzzword that encompasses not only what biologists understand as evolution, but all of the background science that provides evidence of an old earth and a changing universe. Another is that biological evolution in particular is seen as assigning humans the status of just another animal, not a special being with an intimate connection to a creator god. Finally, I suspect that our usual sequence of science courses for high school has a lot to do with it. Most students last study earth science or geology in elementary or middle school, before the age when students are really digging into the meat of the subject. But biology is the "easy" lab science that everyone takes, and since evolution is foundational, everyone encounters it at some point. 

    • Thanks 1
  5. I had mine on Tuesday. I felt a little tired on Wednesday, and the glands in my armpit on the side I got the shot have been a bit swollen. My 15 y/o had it at the same time. It was his first booster and he had a reaction similar to my reaction to my first booster—fever, chills, feeling crummy for a day. 12 y/o had it too and complained that the shot hurt and his arm hurt for a day, but otherwise no SEs. We’ve all had Pfizer for all our doses and haven’t had covid as far as we know. 15 y/o and I didn’t even feel the shot, but we’re good at relaxing before a shot. 12 y/o gets nervous and tenses up. 

    • Like 3
  6. Our first day is also our first day of co-op, so my kids are sure to have a good day regardless of me. Unless I somehow embarrass my teens, but it’s not like I haven’t been practicing my interpretive dance—it’s looking pretty good. 

    • Like 2
    • Haha 9
  7. My kids who are eligible age-wise and I are getting the bivalent shot tonight. Our outside-the-house activities started last week so I’ve felt like I’m watching a horse race between “getting covid” and “bivalent vaccine.”

    • Like 1
  8. When we lived in rentals and had to prevent our cat from scratching molding we used the SoftPaws caps. Cameron was a medium-cooperative cat, so the caps worked reasonably well. They would have been impossible to apply to the grouchy cat I grew up with, and would be super easy with our current, chill, cats, but the current cats aren't super destructive and we don't care about light scratching. 

    • Like 1
  9. I'll be using it with my 9th grader this year. Instead of using the fill-in-the-blank pages I'll have him do some Writing Revolution-style exercises, and he'll do longer writing assignments associated with the unit studies. For history we're going to do a deep dive on the early middle ages in the British Isles, including a series of lectures and living history instruction at a local medieval living history museum, and a few Great Courses series--Wondrium actually has a great selection of relevant courses.

  10. What a tough situation. Does she have accommodations at the college? The school should have therapists available, but I would understand her reluctance to use the service if they've been difficult before. Is she passing her classes? It might be worth talking to the current profs to see about taking incompletes in her classes to finish up at home, if possible. I don't have any ideas for the long term though. I had two friends in college who had similar paths, and both ended up on academic probation and then unenrolled. They both took a few years to figure out how to navigate life, and then returned to school with much better results. 

    • Like 1
  11. I'm planning for my rising 9th grader, and was surprised by the order of topics in Miller-Levine. Unit one was what I expected: scientific method, basic chemistry, etc., but then unit 2 jumps to ecology? Now I'm old and haven't taken an intro to bio class in 25 or so years, but I had thought we'd do a general order of basic chemistry for life science, cells, genetics, evolution, basic organismal bio, and ecology at the end. I haven't looked at a lot of lesson plans or current high school biology textbooks, but now I'm wondering if starting with ecology is an idiosyncrasy of the Miller-Levine book, or if it's a more general trend of how biology is taught now. I hadn't planned on using the teacher's guide, but now I'm curious if it explains the choice of topic sequence. 

    If you used Miller-Levine, did you follow the sequence in the book, or the traditional sequence? Is there a pedagogical reason for ecology before cell biology? 

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