Family Schooling: Art and Marine Biology

 We finished off our unit of Meet the Masters this week with Pierre-Auguste Renoir. 

We used some nice quality water color crayons to create the project that went with this unit.  I loved the vivid colors that they made.  The instructions said to make the top landscape and fold it down on the water to make the reflection.  We did that once, but it did not work well and so just drew in the reflections on the others.

The kids loved this medium and followed up with many additional paintings. 

Then we shifted from art back to science.  We read through the botany curriculum together and felt like it was all too familiar for farm kids. Parts of a seed anyone? For example, this is brother M's avocado tree and he has a pomegranate (grown from seed also) that is on the front stoop. 

To Brother S's delight we decided to do the Marine Biology curriculum.  We did the first 3 units this week, including several fun experiments. 

We made a continental shelf, continental slope, and pelagic zone in which to test waves.  I did not have any sand, so we used local clay.  It worked for about 2 minutes and then the clay started absorbing the water and turned the whole thing into a mudpie. I am going to buy some sand for one of my landscaping projects so we may need to repeat this project. 

We used our shell collection for one of the sections about marine life's colors, shapes, and skeletons. 

We did an experiment with hot water and blue ice cubes to illustrate how ocean currents work.  This was my favorite one.  They really did move by themselves and make swirls. 

We did an experiment on buoyancy with regular water, salt water, and sugar water. 

And we did an experiment that illustrated the level of light entering the water at different zones.