Family Schooling: Biology

We finished off our Notgrass American History books a week ago and moved on to Biology: Kingdoms and Classifications.  I taught this class at our homeschool co-op, but felt that the kids and I needed to go through it again.  It is a wonderful curriculum with a lot of fun activities and information.  Like all science curriculums, it takes some investment to really get a lot out of it. I bought a microscope and a bunch of pre-made slides last year. We have acquired more slides over time and are getting better at making them too.  We covered units 1-5 last week and will work on the second half over the next 10 days or so.
 I bought a set of agar plates (petri dishes with the substrate already prepared) to do the recommended bacteria growing experiment. It is partly fun and partly gross watching the bacteria grow that we collected from various locations.
For one day's lesson we read and did the activities about the fungi kingdom. Then we looked at fungi found growing wild in our yard and talked once again about how most of them are poisonous and it is better not to try eating any of it even if they think they can identify it.  Another day we learned about the Protista kingdom. After the lesson, we looked at some fantastic videos of the protist kingdom and especially enjoyed this one on diatoms.  They are so beautiful.