Because honestly, if I had to take care of this all on my own, it wouldn’t have been as cool, it would have taken at least twice as long, and I may have actually puked.
My son dissected a frog.
Thank goodness our friend and neighbor is a high school biology teacher who knows his way around the insides of amphibians.
Homeschooling moms like to emphasize to their kids not just the information they are supposed to know, but how to get information if it isn’t just laid out for them in a book on their lap. And on top of that, the kids need to know how to discern between accurate, credible information and biased or just plain false information. (You can actually learn a lot from biased info – like various personal or cultural perceptions, etc., but you can’t get anything beneficial really from something that is just plain wrong.)
Beside the internet – which is full of awesome tools like homeschooling blogs *wink wink* as well as a bunch of rotten junk – there are actual living human beings with stores of knowledge that they are happy and willing to share with people who really are interested in learning. It’s a great idea to ask a neighbor or associate to share some knowledge with your kids. And besides learning the subject matter, the children learn how to appropriately interact with people, how to ask questions, and how to speak face to face as opposed to via a screen. (That particular skill is becoming more and more important – and rare – as screens are becoming our culture’s communication medium of choice.)
And unlike the internet, I wasn’t worried about our neighbor misleading my son.
It was just a frog dissection, after all.
Ew.
And yet, so cool at the same time.
Our neighbor walked my son through all the snips and pokes and pointed out the more important organs, as well as ask some really interesting questions. And I was really pleased (also extremely relieved! *phew*) that my 5th grader could answer the questions correctly. Well, all except one. (Why would the arteries big bigger and have thicker and stronger walls than the veins? If you can’t figure it out, let me and I’ll have my 5th grader tell you. He didn’t know before last night, but he sure knows now!)
My son’s bio knowledge is pretty good. Now we just need to work on giving answers that are more than 2 words long. Laconic even, you might say.
Nobody’s perfect. Especially in 5th grade.
(At least he can express himself without relying on emojis or insert #savethefrogs or #biorules or # anything into his conversations.)
Photos below. View at your own risk!
They aren’t that bad. But I did feel a little nauseated after we were all done.
The Honest Homeschool 