The last two weeks we have been learning about the early Judges of Israel, the Hittites, the Hyksos, the Middle East, and Metallurgy.

 

I ended up buying the book above “The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe” by Theodore Gray.

If you would like to learn about the elements it is a great book! I really like the visual given for each element!

 

We also watched “Nova: Hunting the Elements” on Netflix which I highly recommend.

It gives a great intro to what the elements are and is told in such a way that the boys enjoyed it.

Popcorn helped as well…

 

Netflix also has several “How Stuff Works” episodes on metal.

We have watched the one on steel so far and it was really interesting.

 

The book above “Metal” by Claire Llewellyn gives a really good intro to metal.

We have been using Wikipedia and the free lapbook I found for most of our information on metal so we have not needed it yet though.

To learn about the early judges of Israel we mostly used the Action Bible.

The boys really like it and it gets the story across.

 

The “Hittite Warrior” is about the time of Deborah also though so they are learning about it some from that.

The boys have really like this book, the only problem I have with it is we are learning history using Ussher’s Timeline and the book does not use that so some of the information about what is taking place at the same time is off.

I do like them to hear both sides though so this does not bother me too much.

 

A really fun source for Deborah is the “Battle at the Kishon” by the Imagination Station!

I bought it on itunes and we really enjoyed listening to it!

 

We watched a video from “Digging up the Past” about the Pyramids of Egypt to learn more about the Hyksos.

 

Also the Smithsonian Channel has several short clips about the Hittites that we enjoyed watching.

I try to find as much as I can that would give the boys a good idea of what it would be like to live during the time we are learning about.

 

I also really like these two geography games I found for the boys to play.

The one on ducksters.com you have to name the countries in the middle east and kidsgeo.com you have to place the countries that are in that continent.

My boys actually enjoyed both a lot and I am happy to be learning about them at the same time!

Geography has never been my strong suit.

I found out you can buy Iron Filings from a thrifty mom‘s blog post.

I do recommend that you place the magnet into a ziplock bag before you let your children do this.

They ended up putting the iron filings on the magnet to play with and shape.

I still have not gotten all of the iron off those magnets…

We did the “Eating Nails for Breakfast” experiment.

Being the amazing mom I am, I had them eat a bowl before I explained what we were doing.

My oldest looked a bit sick when I said we were going to see if there was metal in what he just ate.

He was also not really happy that I was using the last of their sugary cereal to compare to the iron in total.

We used hot water to dissolve the cereal.

It dissolved in less than 15mins.

We also extracted the iron so we could look at it under our microscope(one of my favorite school purchases).

It was crazy to look at it that close and think you just ate it!

He was a bit grossed out.

I might have considered this payback for giving me a hard time during some of our school subjects that day if I were not an adult.

But I am an adult so of course I did not do that…

We tested metals thermal conductivity with a spoon and a hot skillet, similar experiment here.

We just placed the spoon on the hot skillet until it started to warm up, we did the same thing with one of my plastic cooking spoons to see if it was a conductor.

 

Information on Metallurgy is hard to find for young kids so I was pretty excited to find a free lapbook about metals on freehomeschooldeals.com.

We have not assembled much of the lapbook(we had never made one before this) but I am using a lot of the information that they provide.

The next experiment we did was on rust.

I took it from two different experiments actually found, here and here.

My oldest was in charge of documenting the reactions of iron filings in, water(control), water with vinegar, and water with salt.

My youngest was in charge of documenting the reactions of steel wool in, water(control), water with vinegar, and water with salt.

My parents were in town for this one.

We studied the rust under our microscope again.

It was incredible!

 

We will be doing a slightly different test this week using distilled water.

Our water has too many minerals and chemicals in it and was not a very good control.

I hope this helped someone looking to do something similar!

This took me a lot of time to find information on so I will be glad if I saved just one person a couple hours!

I had no clue that when you try to research “metal” you get a lot of crazy painted musicians…

I did eventually get on the right track though!

Do you have a favorite experiment with metal?

We are continuing our study for the rest of this month so I would appreciate any tips!