Lab Work
Now for some lab work for you! Assuming you have a compound microscope available, purchase at least the prepared onion tip plant mitosis slide and possibly the roundworm animal mitosis slide at Home Science Tools or watch this video to make your own slide. Read through and then complete Lab IV-3 (pp. 173-183) in the Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments by Robert and Barbara Thompson. Write up your lab report using the guidelines on pp. 5-6 of the same book. What further questions do you have? How would you go about answering them? How could you use your slide to compare how much time is spent in each phase of mitosis?
As we move into Chemistry in Form 5a or 11th grade we continue along the same vein. Read the Introduction of General Chemistry found in the Appendix. Narrate in a way that is helpful to you as you read. You may need to read aloud and narrate orally or perhaps it works better for you to read and then narrate silently to yourself. Perhaps you need to outline the chapter or make notes in the margin. You may want to explain the ideas to someone else to hone your understanding. Then choose a couple questions from the end of the chapter to answer in your notebook.
Disciplinary studies must be accompanied by hands-on labs that include investigation and promote student generated questions and subsequent experiments. Experiments culminate in lab reports fostering fluency in written communication integrated with mathematical fluency. Current events in science are read and recorded providing students with more things to wonder about, weigh, and respond to as citizens with the job of accepting or rejecting ideas. Wider reading of scientists and their work in other disciplines expand their horizons and give them opportunity to see connections across the disciplines. As they continue to foster a deeper relationship with nature, they are assuring for themselves life-long friends, habits, ways of seeing, and joyful discoveries all of their days. Delving into issues of science and faith is crucial as they begin to own their faith apart from their parents and prepare to discuss such issues in the broader context of college, workplace, church, neighborhood, friends and family.
Form 6 (grade 12) allows for a broadening of the disciplines even more as the main science requirements for most colleges and universities will have been fulfilled. Botany, astronomy, geology, microbiology, vector physics, anatomy, ecology etc. all can come into the foreground as students make choices on what interests they want to pursue. All expand their knowledge of the universe and grow their wonder and awe of what God has done. This, along with their studies in all the other areas of the curriculum, makes for magnanimous citizens, adults with relationships motivated and sustained by love in many directions. They have been living a full life and they have a full life before them no matter what they pursue after finishing their highschool years.