We’re taking Tactile Tuesday into the kitchen! Kitchen Homeschooling Science. The kitchen is a great place to teach science (and math). You can enhance lessons with a few every day household items!
This past week we went to the beach and took our Apologia book to learn about tides and ocean zones. But how do you teach ocean zones to a tactile kid? Make them!
We took a plastic container, taped construction paper to the outside, and labelled each zone.
Then we filled it with water and added “stuff” to the container for discussion. Oil was a great example to use for plankton. It hangs out on the top (phytoplankton) and also proves to be a “benthic organism” because you can swirl up the water and the oil / plankton float along with the current.
We dumped some mini chocolate morsels that sunk – so they represented our angler fish and midnight zone dwellers. Most spices float – majority of ocean animals are found in the sunlit zone so our parsley and basil represented fish.
The boy wanted to add a few ice cubes from our ice maker – which were the perfect shape to represent dolphins (they float and are curved like a dolphin’s back).
Kitchen Homeschooling Science is fun!
I had no plans. I had no expectations. I was prepared to clean up a gross mess with joy all for the sake of education. It ended up being great fun together as we created a wonderful hands-on ocean activity to drive home some key points from the curriculum! I didn’t create anything “new” (filled up a quality time love language)!
Have you tried Kitchen Homeschooling Science before?
Not interested in making ocean zones – how about an ocean animals word hunt to add to a lesson? (I also created a letter O preschool hunt for little ones).
Oh wow what a fun experiment. We love doing science in our kitchen. We probably do more science and art than cooking in our kitchen.
art in the kitchen? curious!!
Love that statement about finidng ways to work with yourself and each other without going against your nature SUCH an important part of homeschooling and life. Off to read the rest of the interview .and on another note, would love you to come check out the first of a new series I’m doing, Rise Up: Stories from the Mother Net inspiration from women whose journey into motherhood also brought out their hearts for advocacy and change.
Neat idea. We are at the exact same spot in Apologia’s Swimming Creatures . Will perhaps check back to see how you are incorporating the kinesthetic/tactile component into what you are studying. Thanks for sharing.
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Great idea! We are in the same spot as well in or Swimming Creatures books. Your definitely going to be bookmarked because my girls love hands on activities.
HI, I saw your tweet while searching “#homeschool”. Thought I’d share my two cents on My Fathers World since I used the last year for my twin boys. I liked it oavlerl. My boys learned the alphabet and letter sounds well, there was a lot of cutting out and pasting, which they got really good at. The cons were the it was pretty repetitive, the work pages are all very similar from week to week just with a different letter each week. It does not cover much math (only some counting), or telling time, money, any of that. So I had to do a lot of supplementing of the other things I wanted to teach. It also directs you to present info for different topics (ie the moon, goats and farms, cows, etc.) from encyclopedias, and other books. And to read books about those topics. So it’s not as all inclusive as I would’ve liked. But had a good basis for covering letters and learning to read.Sorry, I guess that was quite a bit more than my two cents,
, hope it helps.