HS Biology labs

[Deece in MN]

What would be the best way to approach labs for Biology?

 

I just ordered The Teaching Company's Biology: The Science of Life course and Campbells Biology text (it was recommended for the Teaching Co. course).

 

I was looking on-line for some lab ideas. I found some free high school Biology lab activities that I could print off and have ds work through.

 

I also found this:

http://www.sciencecourseware.org/BLOL/

You purchase a lab manual for $30 and get a 1 year access to the on-line labs. I think you can also purchase a 1 year subscription without buying the lab manual.

 

I was also looking at Castle Heights Biology lab manual.

 

Should I choose 1 of these options or do a combination? What types of labs have you done if you have completed a Biology course?

 

Thanks for any advice!

[Jane in NC]

What would be the best way to approach labs for Biology?

 

 

There are some terrific ideas available on the Internet. For example, a standard AP biology lab is on diffusion and osmosis. You can buy a kit for AP Bio Lab 1 from Wards or Carolina Biological Supply, or you can do a pretty good version of it with cornstarch and cheap baggies:

 

http://www.biologycorner.com/worksheets/diffusion.htm

 

Of course, a lot of people prefer Castle Heights or something similar so that you don't have to plan the labs. We have done a hodge podge of real labs, simulations, and oddities (my son photographed a necropsy of a diseased loon) and I feel pretty good about what he has done without having invested in a specific lab kit. I did spend some money at Carolina Biological to pick up a few supplies, but many of our labs involve a stop at Lowes Home Improvement (materials needed for the light box he constructed for his Brassica plants and butterflies) or the pharmacy (syringe and ethyl alcohol needed for something).

 

Jane

[Deece in MN]

Thanks for the reply. The link you posted is from a site I found and bookmarked. :)

I think I am just going to pull some labs and activities from the web. It is nice to know that someone else has done this successfully. I have quite a bit of science supplies for labs and experiments so I don't want to buy a kit and have a bunch of duplicate items.

The one thing we do need to purchase is a microscope, so that is what I should research and invest in.

I appreciate your reply as it has helped me feel more confident in my plan. :)

[Jane in NC]

It is nice to know that someone else has done this successfully.

 

If you need help on a particular lab, you should probably post here. Bev in B'ville has given me ideas--wealth of information out there!

 

One year I invested in a kit and found that I only used half of the materials. Overall it was a waste, so I am less inclined to go this route. Also, we get a kick out of the "do it yourself" aspect and have jerryrigged all sorts of things. Lots of learning in the process!

 

Jane

[Carrie in NC]

and then search the web for ideas. I find kits at Carolina Science Supply (formerly Carolina Biological).

 

I'm not overly impressed with Castle Heights. It seems heavy on the dissection end, and without much variety of labs in other areas. Other people have used it and enjoyed it, however.

 

Some of the lab activities we do in the tutorial are fairly simple, and we do several microscope labs where I have the students look at specimens and draw and label what they see. I found a fun activity online that demonstrates how enzymes work using pennies and the students hands as the enzymes.

[Ruth in NC]

I teach biology lab to 5 kids every week and here are a few more sites to mine for labs. Good luck.

 

http://www.scienceteacherprogram.org/biology/biolps.html

 

http://sciencenetlinks.com/matrix.cfm

look down the page for 9-12 links

 

http://sciencespot.net/Pages/classbio.html

 

http://www.biology-resources.com/biology-experiments2.html

 

Ruth in NC

http://travelingjews.blogspot.com/

[Beth in SW WA]

This is a great thread! Thanks for sharing the info and links... :)

[Kirsten in MO]

I just signed my son up for the this:

 

http://www.landryacademy.com/lab-intensives.htm

 

If there is one scheduled for your area, you can get the labs done in two days! We haven't done it yet, though, so I can't give an opinion yet.

 

Kirsten

[BeckyFL]

We've done labs in the past by ordering kits from Home Science Tools to go with certain textbooks (Apologia), etc.

 

This year, we have about 7 of us in our area who have signed up for the Lab Intensive that is coming to our state (1 1/2 hour a way but it looked worth it) from Landry Academy (see above link). We signed up when the discount was 50% off so it was $110. For that price, I couldn't even buy all the specimens for all that they are doing. It's a 2 day intensive lab covering even things from college anatomy classes. I'm thinking it should take care of 2 lab credits. You could see if there is one coming to your area. The current discount (I think 40% ends soon).

 

Also sometimes, there are local programs. Our science museum offers labs to homeschoolers. If you check with your support group, they may know of resources like that. We also have a nauture preserve that offers labs. Our homeschool group took the initiative to contact them about working with homescoolers and they set up things based on need.

[SkateLeft]

What types of labs have you done if you have completed a Biology course?

 

My daughter used the Biology Labpaq BK-1 from Labpaqs. It was so thorough and rigorous, and taught her how to keep lab notes and write a lab report. In my 11 years of homeschooling, it's some of the best money we've spent on any educational item.

 

This year, she's taking chemistry through PSEO, and she has to spend three hours in the open chem lab each week. She says that last year's Labpaq really prepared her for the procedures and lab reports this year.

 

If you're looking for a comprehensive, rigorous lab option, I highly recommend the Labpaq.

[nomad]

We plan to use the Exploring Biology text by Campbell starting in about a month or so.

 

I've spent hours researching lab kits and other options for biology labs. We'd like to do hands-on wherever possible, including the dissections (minus the fetal pig), chemical analysis/microscope, and ecology labs as well.

 

Had I known what I know now after hours of research, I would simply place the order for Labpaq -- either BK1 for general biology or HS AP if we decided that the AP route was for us. But while I was waiting for information from Hands-on Labs about their Labpaq kits(description of the experiments, lab supplies list and approval for obtaining the teachers keys not shipped with the labs), I started researching the labs that would go along with Exploring Life -- as when the EL text was written the on-line resources and labs were tightly integrated with the course.

 

Another WTM member (thank you, thank you) sent scanned copies of Exploring Life lab material requirements so I could research what we'd need before receiving the used EL lab teacher and student books I'd ordered. I spent hours on the Carolina and Home Science Tools sites trying to understand what I needed to order and what I could substitute. Also found a chemical supplier willing to send a sample of an enzyme needed for one lab to me. (BTW Carolina offers a $25 coupon for first time orders, but Home Science Tools still came out less expensive for the materials I needed.)

 

After looking at all the Exploring Life lab materials needed there were about 4 labs out of 36 (or suggested alternative labs) that I could not do. We live overseas and some materials, including live specimens and some of the microscope chemicals, cannot be mailed to us. Also some of the materials are supplied only in quantities of 30 for a classroom. Not very economical! The cost for the labs I could do came out to about the same price as ordering the Labpac kits.

 

Let me know if you have any specific questions. I need to quit analyzing and place an order!

 

Deb

[In The Great White North]

Is there anything similar to the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments for biology?

[Guest]

Yes. My wife and I are writing Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture right now. It will be published by O'Reilly/MAKE early in 2012. We're also putting together a kit that includes specialty equipment and chemicals required for the experiments.

 

Yay!!! This is perfect timing for us, as dd is spending the fall/winter reading Ian Stewart's books and other articles, with no lab. We'll do a lab-intensive spring and summer then.

[Joules]

Yes. My wife and I are writing Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture right now. It will be published by O'Reilly/MAKE early in 2012. We're also putting together a kit that includes specialty equipment and chemicals required for the experiments.

 

Thank You! We are using Thinkwell for the lectures right now and I've been looking for labs. We'll just wait until next year and do a lab intensive in the spring.

[kiana]

Yes. My wife and I are writing Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture right now. It will be published by O'Reilly/MAKE early in 2012. We're also putting together a kit that includes specialty equipment and chemicals required for the experiments.

 

Awesome!

[EKS]

We're using one of the LabPaqs.

[Colleen in NS]

Yes. My wife and I are writing Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture right now. It will be published by O'Reilly/MAKE early in 2012. We're also putting together a kit that includes specialty equipment and chemicals required for the experiments.

 

Sidetrack: By any chance, might you have plans to also put out a physics book and lab kit? If so, any idea when? I really like the chemistry book!

[TheHomeScientist]

Sidetrack: By any chance, might you have plans to also put out a physics book and lab kit? If so, any idea when? I really like the chemistry book!

 

The short answer is that, yes, we do plan to do a physics book and kit, eventually. We're not yet sure when, and we don't have a physics book under contract (yet) with O'Reilly/MAKE. Complicating matters is that O'Reilly/MAKE actually signed a physics book in the Illustrated Guide series with another author, who never finished the book. It'd actually be more work for us to try to use that partial book as a starting point, so we'll do the physics book for O'Reilly/MAKE only if they'll allow us to start from a clean slate. If they won't, we'll do the physics book ourselves and self-publish it to go along with the kit. But it'll probably be a couple years at least until we can get a physics book/kit ready to go.

 

There's also the not-yet-published Illustrated Guide on Forensics. We wrote that one soon after the chemistry book, but O'Reilly/MAKE decided that the market situation made it too risky to publish it. (It costs $100,000+ to put a book into print, and the forecast sales determine whether or not a book ends up being published. Book sales have tanked since the 2008 financial crisis, and they have to think long and hard about publishing new titles.) Again, whether or not O'Reilly/MAKE decides to publish that book in print, we're going to do a forensics book/kit next year. It may just end up with the manual being PDF-only.

[persinem]

Wow, I'm so glad to hear that there will be an equivalent to the "Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments" for Biology next year! That's great news.

 

Regarding how to do biology labs at home--it was helpful to me to figure out what my student's goals were. To do well on the SAT II for biology? To do well on the AP test? To learn biology in a way that engages and excites her? To learn good lab technique? Ok, it's "all of the above" to some extent, but we realized early on that just doing "The Twelve" AP labs was not going to light her fire.

 

So for many of the required labs, we'll be doing the work virtually, here:

 

http://www.uccp.org/index.php/course-catalog/106

 

and in the meantime she's doing more inquiry-based labs in the real world, where she is following her own interests. For the past two months she has been doing a lot of self-designed study of protists--how to grow cultures, what might go wrong when you do, what environments work best for growing successful cultures of each kind of organism, and so on. These investigations aren't on the list of required labs but they dovetail so neatly into the curriculum, when you think of it--she has observed mitosis many times, for example, and has learned the parts of the cell by observing single-celled animals in action, and studying Euglena has complemented the study of photosynthesis. Even the accidents she gets in her real-world labs are useful--for instance, one of her cultures was invaded by rotifers...how?

 

I guess my advice would be to invest in a good microscope, and good dissecting tools, and after that to build into your course outline some amount of time to explore, even if it means doing some of the required labs in a virtual environment so that you have have the time/budget for these more inquiry-based activities.

 

Someone has already mentioned Carolina Biological Supply for live organisms--they are great. Another useful site to us is Bio Corporation, which sells single specimens of all kinds of preserved organisms for those who are interested in dissection labs:

 

http://www.biologyproducts.com/specimen.cfm?PageNum_getSpecimen=2

[persinem]

I wanted to add something about textbooks.

 

We are an "academic" homeschool family so naturally when it was time for Biology I went out and bought a used copy of the Campbell tome used in many AP classes--

 

http://wps.aw.com/wps/media/access/Pearson_Default/1663/1703422/login.html

 

Wow, did it ever NOT work for my biology-loving student! So we have since switched to the alternative used in many AP classes, sometimes affectionately known as "Campbell Lite:"

 

http://www.pearsonhighered.com/product?ISBN=0321489845

 

We got a copy for $9 online.

 

For a change of pace we also use a highly illustrative book called Exploring the Way Life Works:

 

http://waylifeworks.jbpub.com/

 

The Way Life Works is a pure delight, great for visual learners. And the "Campbell Lite" book, I find, covers the needed material in ENOUGH detail without bogging my student down in detail she doesn't have to know at this time, even to do well on the AP exam.

 

Back-edition used texts are so inexpensive now and so easy to find online that I thought I'd recommend these alternatives, in case someone else who has invested in Campbell Heavy discovered it was counter-productive to their students' learning and enjoyment of science.

[Colleen in NS]

The short answer is that, yes, we do plan to do a physics book and kit, eventually. We're not yet sure when, and we don't have a physics book under contract (yet) with O'Reilly/MAKE. Complicating matters is that O'Reilly/MAKE actually signed a physics book in the Illustrated Guide series with another author, who never finished the book. It'd actually be more work for us to try to use that partial book as a starting point, so we'll do the physics book for O'Reilly/MAKE only if they'll allow us to start from a clean slate. If they won't, we'll do the physics book ourselves and self-publish it to go along with the kit. But it'll probably be a couple years at least until we can get a physics book/kit ready to go.

 

Oh, I hope it works out for you to publish from a clean slate!! Could you have it ready for Summer 2013, please? Just kidding. I'll be on the lookout.

 

There's also the not-yet-published Illustrated Guide on Forensics. We wrote that one soon after the chemistry book, but O'Reilly/MAKE decided that the market situation made it too risky to publish it. (It costs $100,000+ to put a book into print, and the forecast sales determine whether or not a book ends up being published. Book sales have tanked since the 2008 financial crisis, and they have to think long and hard about publishing new titles.) Again, whether or not O'Reilly/MAKE decides to publish that book in print, we're going to do a forensics book/kit next year. It may just end up with the manual being PDF-only.

 

Yay! That sounds really cool!