weds4ed respiration

I guess it is officially back to school week. We don’t go to school, and I have had a significant number of people at work actually ask about going back to school, and then home education when I have said we aren’t. mostly very positive, in fact I think more positive now than it was at the beginning. Either people are getting more tolerant/aware of diversity or less sold on our schooling system. We don’t go back to school. Home education doesn’t really have such big booms and busts as term time and holidays at school do. There is a pattern to it – for us – in that we do perhaps more worky stuff in the winter when the weather is worse, and more visiting and outdoory stuff in the summer months. we are less worky for longer, but there are no real no education weeks. I dont imagine that that is different from schooled children, as even in their holidays they are visiting places and doing different things. Our actual holidays are taken more evenly through the year, but I have to admit that by july we are all on a go slow for bookishness and enthusiastic for exploring, so that is what we do. Our groups and meetings also tend to have, therefore, a naturalish hiatus over the summer as well.

We were pleased to be restarting our weds4ed group again. The children have seen each other at a number of different things, so there often isn’t such a catching up to do, but we welcomed Ffish [frenchfish] as the deependers are doing another en famille exchange, this time for their second son kfish [they are fishes, like we are beans!]. so for those keen to see how another en famille exchange might go, having read about our exchange and our international daughter FrB [frenchbean], please hop over to the deependers. Not everyone made it, as still in that not quite back together mode had some still holidaying etc.

Science plans for weds4ed

Since SB and Jfish are contemplating their biology gcse this year, and there is a fab website for biology, I am going to be doing some biology experiments until I or the children get bored . I am thinking I will have some alternate experiments for those who are not so interested/have shorter attention spans/are younger etc. and will see what this MOOC has to offer. It looks fun, interesting and more varied. I’ll see how things pan out!

For this session, we did respiration. I recapped on the biological rather than medical term of respiration and what it meant, including the link to the website above for the powerpoint, and also BBC bitesize so that we were all happy with what happened. We then all did a base experiment of looking at our vital capacity. trouble shooting the heath robinson equipment is an essential part of learning I feel! when we were reasonably confident that we had at least slightly reliable measurements, we then measured our tidal volumes. We exercised and remeasured them . we learnt a number of additional things – if you exercise too much you cant do the experiment, as the tube length of dead space and also its reduced flow rate meant you were too short of breath and had to stop and gulp in air [discussion] , breath hold length and the relationship between tv and vc weren’t very exact – but we could see where we were going with this as we had a discussion as to why we might need such a large vc [most of our group were approx x10 to tv], and we could see that body size mattered, as predicted, as did wind instrument playing. we also laughed a lot and completely soaked the kitchen floor! Here are some photos of my experimenters.

and a picture or 2 of our results

We also did some maths with TB – SB, and lfish in particular got carried away and took ages over it. Jfish and SB did some french with kfish, and everyone did some zentangles. Whilst minecrafting and games playing happened, afish [who isn't keen on either] did fimo with me. I made a tealight holder for SB.