Narragansett Bay URI Campus Science class

This month the topic was Aquatic invaders

We played a little game to illustrate how Aquatic Invaders can invade a habitat and change the dynamics of said habitat

Playing musical chairs to see which species got to stay

Who would win? The home species or the invaders?

Jadyn was in a punky mood that day, she was an invader and not too happy about it I guess, but I'm glad we went because it was a really fun class and very interesting

wrapping up the class

explaining how the invading species can change the habitat and make it inhospitable to the species that were already living there

Before and after pictures of the same area. Before nice and clean, after YUCK!

2nd part of class, off to the research aquarium

The stairway in

Learning about bacteria

Explaining how they put plastic in the water and yucky things attach themselves to the plastic and then they can take the plastic and study what is in a certain body of water, pretty neat!

Flounder tank

This lobster is alive! But it's red like a cooked lobster, that is because lobsters get their color from vegetation where they live! You learn something new every day

More Lobster facts, Jadyn wanted to know how come the lobster didn't bite him lol

This lobster has 2 claws, a cutting claw and a large claw, very rarely seen

On to the shark tank, this tank was full of small sharks and they all kept hopping up out of the water to say high, this one almost grabbed my camera and scared me half to death in the process

The class waiting for the sharks to pop up and say howdy

Peek a Boo, got any food?

Sting ray and shark eggs in another tank

....and back to the sharks

smile Jadyn!

This shark jumped out of the water so high that it scared Jadyn and she almost fell off of the block she was standing on, her reaction to that? "That was SO AWESOME!" bad mood eradicated! Thank you mister jumpy shark!

On to the wave machine

It may be a bit hard to see in the pictures, but this is the wave machine, they showed us how waves behave in the ocean it was very cool pay close attention to the top of the tank

This section of the tank is filled with Burger King Straws LOL I wonder how the King feels about that?

This concluded our day at the campus, next month SQUID!

How water is absorbed

This week we studied how water is absorbed First we packed a little bowl full of dried whole peas and then filled in all the little spaces with water

The we put lids on them and let them sit overnight. The next morning the lids had popped off and there were little peas EVERYWHERE! I forgot to get a picture of it, but the kids thought it was wicked cool.

Then we used sugar cubes and colored water to see how the water is absorbed.

We watched the water travel up....

..and up through the sugar cubes, until they melted and collapsed into a blue sugary mess

The we poured salt on cucumber slices and watched the salt pull the water out of the slices

Next we took 1 piece of dry bread and put it in a ziploc plastic bag and sprayed some water on another piece and put that in a plastic bag and we are waiting to see which one grows mold first

Which one do you think?

Halloween

Fall is my favorite season, I love the leaves and the crispy cool air and the smell of snow on it's way..this weekend the kids raked up some leaves We stocked up on some hay for the bunny to keep warm as the weather gets chilly

Then we enjoyed the cool dry weather

HALLOWEEN...this is Jesse trying to look like a mean dragon lol

Jadyn in her moon fairy costume

again

My moon fairy and her pet dragon

Then we had a fun night with friends

Beginning of Fall George Washington

We were very busy bees last week in school. We learned about George Washington Had some silly fun making tricorn hats

Learned how and why the seasons change

pressed some leaves and made bookmarks with them

made some pretty trees with falling leaves for our seasonal window in the kitchen

THEN we made our own ink from crushed strawberries

This freaked me out a bit, but Jesse was very very careful not to get any berries on himself

we crushed and crushed and crushed until

FINALLY we had a nice amount of strawberry ink...and since we made ink we also had to make quill pens to go with the ink

Aren't they pretty?

We took our quill pens and strawberry ink and signed the Declaration of Independance

we had plenty of ink left so we drew some pictures with our quill pens

We also began our science with water lesson. This week we learned how water is absorbed. We put marker dots on coffee filters and poured water on them, notice how the colors seperate as the water is absorbed into them.

Here you can see the colors seperating and you can really see how the green is seperating into yellow and blue. SO COOL.

Close up of green seperating into yellow and blue

More water science next week!....