Bug mania

We seem to have bug mania. I brought in a wasp. A student (they remain anonymous here in the blogosphere) brought in a cricket and a bee. The insects are all viewable at the stereomicroscope.

Your marvellous children were just bristling with questions about bugs, whales, bugs, aardvarks, bugs, and the Great Wall of China. Bee stings were unfortunately a highly relevant topic.

We started a taxonomic diagram. Right now it has only two kingdoms and only two phyla, but it will grow as different organisms capture our attention. Everybody has at least pronounced "arthropod" successfully. If I can remember, I'll take a picture of the diagram and post it here.

You already know that every child built his or her own insect, with the correct number of body segments and legs. I did not furnish materials to add wings or eyes, nor did I tell them about the eye structure. Ideally they'll look at the specimens in class and THEN decide what sort of eye to put on their bugs, and maybe come up with a clever way to do the wings.

I wonder if anybody will think to add a proboscis to a model bug. We can bring it up next week.

Topics of August 23: fish and cicadas, oxygen and clickers

We talked about how fish breathe, and oxygen (in the air and dissolved).

Children had found a beautiful dead cicada and an empty cicada-nymph shell. This led to a discussion of metamorphosis. I brought in several insect books which are on display in the classroom. The cicada and shell are at the stereomicroscope for continued examination.

The cicada makes sound with a little organ tucked into the shell of the thorax. It appears to work by a mechanism very similar to the little clicker you noticed at the sign-in table (which is why the clicker is there, of course, because of the cicadas).

Keep the questions coming. It is perfectly legal to write the question at home and bring it to school to drop in the Question Box.

New microscope

I am pleased to announce the school's acquisition of a very fine Zeiss
stereomicroscope. This low-magnification (16x-40x) instrument nicely complements the compound (high-power) ( 40x-400x) microscope we already have. The new scope is ideal for examining bugs, flowers, dirt, shoelaces, rocks, jewelry, and - - well - - just about anything. You don't have to prepare a slide: you just plop the specimen in the viewfinder and off you go!

I took this picture (head of a cicada) through the microscope. When you look into the microscope you can actually see the many facets of the insect's compound eye, but the camera did not get this detail (probably because the autofocus can't cope with looking into a microscope).

Everybody has had an introductory glance through the microscope, and some of us are already pretty good at operating the focus wheel. The microscope is available all day, every day.

You delight your science specialist every time you say to your child, "I wonder what THAT would look like in the microscope. Do you want to bring it to school and take a look?"

Volcano erupts!

The Tungurahua volcano (just south of Quito, Ecuador) has had a spectacular eruption. Lava shot 8km into the air! If you turned Austin sideways and shot lava 8km upwards from Primavera, it would reach almost to Town Lake.

The volcano also annihilated three villages and killed some dozens of people. I welcome your thoughts as to how to treat this in class:
> suggest buildings were destroyed but tiptoe around the deaths
> full truth but delicately expressed
> skip the whole human-impact aspect

Question Box has been introduced

There is an official Science Question Box in the classroom. All the kids know where it is. If they have a science question, they can write it on a 3x5 card (they all know where to find the 3x5 cards in the Business Area of the classroom) and leave the card in the box. On Wednesday afternoons we peek in the box !