We school all year around but in the summer take on a different schedule. This summer we are doing mostly math, science and geography with field trips and of course lots of reading.
Hands on is one of the best ways to teach a child to relate to science. If he can see it, touch it, smell it, and experience it, he will more than likely remember it. We have done sense experiments where the child is blind folded and then gets to taste different items to see if he can identify them without looking or smelling. It is amazing how much one sense depends on another. Since Sage has been interested in disease and bacteria we decoded to do an experiment to learn about different types of bacteria and where it can come from..... which means everywhere.
After swabbing several chosen areas around the house we were shocked to see what area was used the most and was covered with the most bacteria.
Some Bacteria Facts:
Bacteria were first observed by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1676.
There are helpful and harmful bacteria. 99 % of them are helpful.
Bacteria are living organisms.
There are seven main groups of bacteria, distinguished by their shape and the type of cell wall they possess.
There are six types of very common toxic bacteria which we should try to avoid. This is were washing you hands and the food you eat come in. Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli (E. coli) are two of these types of bacteria.
We ordered our bacteria experiment kits from Steve Spangler Science.
Each of the girls got to choose three places to collect specimens from. Dish 4 was the bathroom door handle while Dish 5 was divided into two parts. One with an under the nail sample and one from the telephone ~ pretty yucky.
Dish 1 was a sample taken from the garbage. Again, this was disgusting and smelled horrible after 3 days.
Dish 6 was also divided into 2 parts. One side was a small toy which wasn't too bad but the other side was a sample from the kitchen faucet. Wow. This was one of the worse. it actually grew over to the other side and started taking over the petri dish.
So, the area with the most bacteria was the trash and the kitchen faucet. The least was the bathroom door handle!
I encourage you to go to Steve Spangles site and view the video. the kit comes with everything you will need for this experiment and your children will love seeing what is the grossest object in your house. We would like to do this again but go out to a store and collect some specimens. ;)
Have a fun science filled summer!!
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