Discovering Nature

Clean enviornment is essential for life. Whatever catastrophic event may have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, it certainly did not do so directly, most likely it is for the event to have triggered environmental changes that had affected the life of these earthly giants.

So, in light of the new politics to allow free will pollution of nature and as a consequence anything produced by nature for human consumption, I decided to educate the children on the importance of clean enviornment. "You wouldn't want to live without clean water" is wonderful first introduction to the topic. For us it was a quick read because we have spoken about the water cycle, water pollution and water cleaning multiple times before. Still, I decided that for us this particular book will be a nice re-introduction to the subject. We then moved on to using our own microscope. We learned how to use it and we observed some readily prepared slides, and some sugar and salt crystals. Great time. This smoothly guided us to "The Complete Book of the Microscope" which I find wonderful. The book offers information on broader set of microscopes and the results obtained with each. This is very motivational. We will try to look at an onion cells and cheek cells. We are going to prepare slides to observe bacteria in yogurt and fungus of yeast.

From here he will move into the world of "Pond Water Zoo" which offers a nice introduction to the taxonomy of living things as well as fine drawings of some  microorganisms commonly encountered in fresh water. We are going to refer to these videos to actually observed creatures before we venture to observe them on our own. We will talk a bit about bacteria; we have already read "You wouldn't want to live without bacteria" but there will be no harm in revisiting the topic. We will add on with a discussion of some of the scientists who contributed to our understanding that specific germs cause specific conditions. We are going to observe how bacteria grows and we will try to determine the dirtiest location in our home. We are also going to see if washing our hands with soap helps reduce the bacteria we carry.

This will lead us to appreciate the book on antibiotics and the book on vaccines better. Of course, hygene is closely related to health and risk for infections so we will read about how nature handles poop and how humans have learned to handle poop as well, after many many years in the smelly dark. In addition I am hoping that we will learn how toilets properly work and we will try to make an example toilet to see the mechanism in action from close.

Story books are important so we will revisit one we have already read and liked- the Water Princess. Later on I will assign Long Way to Water to my daughter but for now this short story will serve us as a reminder of the global concerns. Kariku is a legend from Africa retold in animated form here; we will watch that as a reminder, but this time we will discuss within the context of clean water, and global conflicts.