Cutting up in class

Matt was very interested in science and the natural world, too.
This wasn't because we were homeschooling, though.
He'd always been that way.

We had looked at all kinds of bugs with magnifying glasses and parts of bugs with the microscope. (only 'road kill' bugs, though. We didn't kill them.) We'd done a lot of wildlife watching, documentary watching and book reading since he'd been a little guy.

He was very interested in animal insides, too.
After watching something about dissection on the Discovery channel,
he asked me if we could dissect something someday.

I'd been watching him read books written for adults, and study things that were definitely a few years beyond the suggested grade level for his age, so I was open to the idea.

I did a little looking (didn't have the internet then... homeschooling back then was a lot more difficult, I think) and found a dissection kit and a high school biology unit study set that included everything you ever wanted to know about an earthworm, a frog, a perch and a crawfish... complete with specimens to dissect.
I think it was about 40 dollars for all of it. You should have seen him jumping up and down and clapping when the big brown van drove up out front and delivered the package. I let him open it immediately. It was another afternoon of him reading and me not teaching him anything.

So we started a unit on dissection. He read from the books and got familiar with the insides of the critters on paper. He learned what dorsal and ventral and lateral cuts meant. He told me about how to pin the specimen open and how carefully one had to probe with a preserved specimen.

He was an extremely careful child, so I allowed him to do the actual dissection while I watched.

We both learned quite a few things from the experience. It was utterly fascinating.

Matt absorbed the lessons well. He loved dissecting. Once again, I knew how well he had learned "their" intended lessons by his huge enthusiasm for discussion. He talked about the insides of all those critters for months. We didn't write anything down. I gave him no worksheets. I didn't give him a test. I didn't require him to dissect or suggest that he might like it... the whole experience had been under his control. And I have to add here that Matt is 21 now, and if you were to ask him about the critters he'd dissected as a seven year old, he could tell you all about them. So I guess the lessons 'stuck'.

After that, I figured asking him to do lessons from his science book and workbook set for 2nd graders was sort of silly and pointless.

I subscribed to National Geographic, Zoobooks and Kids Discover and we tossed the science curriculum in favor of The Backyard Scientist series of books, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and dissection. We visited the Oregon Coast Aquarium, the local park (to collect pond scum), collected caterpillars and tadpoles to watch the metamorphosis and learned how to make Venn diagrams to compare types of animals and their circulatory systems etc.

We didn't do those things on a schedule. We just did stuff like that whenever the mood struck us.

The boys I babysat with were jealous. We often purchased enough supplies for them when we did experiments, and waited until after school to do them. They both thought homeschooling was pretty cool.

So did we.

Tomorrow, Lyssa's stealth learning plan.