We homeschool all of our kids, but our high school students take a few classes with a wonderful enrichment program. This year, Meg is taking Chemistry, British Lit and Economics outside the home, and Josie is taking Biology and General Lit and composition. Which brings us to the current season we just survived, known as Science fair project time....
It was high school Science fair time here at {Home} which resulted in much angst/ late nights/ trips to the art store....flies in my fridge...you know, the normal types of stuff....
Meg leans towards life-science type projects, and she tries, mightily, to bring horses into the equation. After the gold-fish training science experiment last year, I issued the proclamation that we would have no more Science fair experiments involving live subjects (after a whole batch of highly trained goldfish died two weeks before her project was due). Famous last words!!! Meg's newest experiment involved mom using her credit card late at night to order 200 blue bottle fly pupae.
homeschool world is crazy world sometimes.
it gets better, they lived in my fridge for weeks. In the butter compartment in the door. I got to see them every time I opened the fridge. good times.
So, her experiment involved testing the efficacy of different fly repellents. She compared a popular insect repellent for families, an all natural insect repellent, and a horse insect repellent. We had 50 flies in 3 containers, plus a control container, and then the fly repellents applied to fly paper on the bottom of the containers. Meg researched the chemical make-up of each repellent and explained the process of how they worked on the flies. It was interesting. [minus the weekend she left and several escaped and spent several days loose in my house]
Josie's Biology Science fair project was a 3-d model of a red blood cell. She constructed a model and researched/wrote a report. She used wooden embroidery hoops, red mesh and pom-poms.
We purchased two sets of big wooden embroidery hoops (because each set has two different sized hoops so they fit inside each other- we wanted them to fit exactly the same size) and then she painted them red. She used hot-glue to attach the red tulle/mesh purchased at the fabric store, and then put big red pom-poms inside to represent the hemoglobin, and a few of them had small white pom-poms attached to represent oxygen. She labeled the different cell parts with little paper signs attached with toothpicks. The only difficulty was making the distinctive donut-hole dimple in the center, she used thread, but it wasn't very convincing. If we had more time to re-plan, I think we would have used darker red paint to make a shadow look for the center, or maybe a darker material in the center. We decided to leave it alone, we didn't want a failed attempt on our hands right before Science fair day.
And so, whew!....done!