Science Alive

Whew.  Spring has sprung so quickly that I'm pretty certain it's already been eclipsed by summer.  Typical of Maryland, our fine state's temperature has done a 0 to 60 in about 2 seconds flat.  We're talking the mercury rising at the speed of a Bentley.  We are not letting a little heat deter us from some outdoor and indoor science explorations.  I could not wait for the emergence of flowers and (gasp) even insects.  Maybe I'm not so fond of the little buzzing guys inside of my home.  But in our outdoor classroom laboratory, insects reign supreme.


To start our week, we learned about the anatomy of flowers.  First, we learned what the word anatomy means:  it is the essential building components of a living creature.  Flowers have lots of important anatomy, including petals, stamen, pistils, and an ovary.  Each piece plays a crucial function in allowing the flower to produce pollen and receive pollen from the air or from bees.  Tweezers and magnifying glasses in hand, we dissected these small wild flowers bit by bit to further explore their important components.

Starting the dissection

Teddy is incredibly careful in his analysis

Great use of the magnifying glass

Brooke and Julia confer

Future surgeon?

Mid week, we had the incredible luck to receive 7 hen eggs and an incubator from Trevor.  The instructions that came with the incubator included language more difficult than my operations management textbook from college.  Still, I prevailed in setting it up because I had a calming group of scientists surrounding me and offering their (admittedly expert) opinions.  As a team, we set the ideal temperature (99.6 F) and also the number of days (21).  We managed to set up our machine to rotate our eggs at a 5 degree angle every 45 minutes.


It is humbling, but I would be fibbing if I didn't admit that these kids were a huge help in digesting the information and helping me program.  Second grade superstars, indeed.


Now that we're set up, it's fully time to analyze our eggs for the next three weeks and chart and determine what is developing each day:

Hen eggs arrive in different sizes and colors... very cool.

We're on day 2!  Hopefully there are some beating hearts within those eggs.

Charleston carefully charts the Week 1 progress.

Julia also does a great job!

Andrew takes the egg development very seriously...

We have to estimate the size of our eggs because we cannot handle them when they are incubating.

We draw diagrams of the most important components of the growing chicks...

Mr. Deyell plays captive audience...