Exploring Creation with Physical Science Chapter 9

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We came back after the holidays to start Chapter 9 of the Apologia, Physical Science Textbook.

That was good and bad.

It was good for me because the experiments this week were pretty easy and didn’t require a lot of stuff to collect and carry into class.

Experiment 9.1, talked about taking the cardboard back of a notebook and using that to make a tunnel to roll some eggs down at and crash into other eggs. I think that’s a good inexpensive idea, but I think it could get messy and you would have to tear up at least two notebooks to get the backing.

My husband and I brainstormed a little bit and came up with the idea of using PVC pipe. He had been changing out some pipes in our basement anyway, so we had some. The only problem was that this particular pipe would only allow a small egg, (think tiny robin’s egg) to pass through.

After looking around a little more in his heap of stuff, Mr. Pete found some rain gutter material and that worked great! You could see the egg rolling down the gutter and it was easy to aim.

Now the bad part was – this was a very, very heavy math unit. I could tell that a lot of my kids were having a problem with math.  This wasn’t super tricky math, but it did require some teaching math skills that I’m not sure I possess. One of the most important parts of this lesson was teaching the kids to label their answer! EX:   It’s not just 200 but 200 mph, or 200 meters/second squared, or whatever it was.  Labels were important.

My own daughter took the test on this and missed two questions and failed to label a few correct answers. I dinged her grade for that a bit. She ended up with 85% and a solid B.