Georgia Posted December 10, 2009 Share Posted December 10, 2009 My dd12 likes the look of the Life Science, so we've purchased the text used. Has anyone done the experiments with this from the Investigations manual? If so, did you buy their equipment? If not, what did you do instead? Any helpful personal experience welcome! Thanks! Georgia Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matryoshka Posted December 10, 2009 Share Posted December 10, 2009 We've been doing the CPO Life Science book this year with a small coop, and have been taking turns doing the labs. We've divvied up the chapters, and each person is responsible for running labs for their chapters. CPO offers two labs per chapter. We meet for 1 1/2 hours biweekly, so labs that can't be fit into that time are impractical - and in biology by its nature many labs are "set this up and come back in 24 hours or more". We've done about half the CPO labs in our covered chapters so far, I'd say. If you were doing this at home, it would be even easier, as then the "come back later" aspect wouldn't phase you as much. There isn't a lot of special equipment to buy so far - you need a microscope, sometimes prepared slides, methylene (sp?) blue and iodine for staining. Oh, brine shrimp - skipped those. We've found relevant hands-on labs from other sources to fill in. We'll have to skip the labs using the Crazy Traits game, which is hundreds of dollars (intended for use by 30+ kids over multiple years), but I'm sure we can come up with something comparable. If you don't already have the lab book (ours came free bundled with the text), the lab sheets with all the materials lists are online at the CPO website. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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