Living Life: Hour By Hour: Review: Science in the Industrial Age

Science seems to be a subject that moms either love to teach or hate to teach. I have to admit that I'm probably more on the hate side when it comes to definitions, names and dates, but I do enjoy experiments. Issac and I have been working through the Science in the Industrial Age Set which is part of the Fifth-Grade Curriculum Kit from Timberdoodle. This book was written by Dr. Jay L.Wile and in this book we learn specifically about science in the 19th century. There are 90 lessons that are split into six different sections. The sections cover specific time frames and there are 15 lessons in each time frame. There are two types of lessons in this book, "normal" lessons and "challenge" lessons. Normal lessons are titled in black and the challenge lessons are titled in red. There are a few ways that you can divide up the lessons. You can do a lesson every other day which will allow you to cover all 15 lessons in each time frame in a typical year. You could also do two lessons a week. Using this way you would skip the challenge lessons and just do the normal lessons. As always it's totally up to you to decide which way you'd like to use this program.

In this kit we received the student reader as well as the answer key. One thing I really liked about this program from the beginning is that there wasn't a ton of writing to go along with the book.Our youngest struggles with writing and often times even if he understands the grade-level work he can't do the writing that is needed to complete to assignments. There are a few review questions at the end of each lesson and they are divided up for the youngest student, the older and the oldest student. I found that we were able to do the questions orally and that worked best for my son. There are also great material lists that have been provided to help you gather needed materials ahead of time. For each set of 15 lessons there is a material list to help you be prepared for when the experiments roll around. Here is a peak at the regular household materials that most people can easily acquire and the last picture is of those items that might be a little harder to find. These items would cover the first 15 lessons.

We really enjoyed learning about the scientist, some I didn't remember ever learning about in school. Ultimately the most fun was the experiments! If we didn't quite have all the materials we just skipped that experiment and kept a list of supplies we needed to go back and complete the lessons we skipped. Here are a few pictures from some of the experiments that we did. One of the first experiments we did that Issac thought was cool was "cooking" eggs without heat. We put one egg in a bowl of water and another egg in a bowl of rubbing alcohol. You leave them sitting overnight and compare the differences in the morning. Sadly, I forgot to get pictures of that experiment, but here is a picture from the book. This is one we'll do again because Issac thought it was cool! I think most kids remember doing experiments with baking soda and vinegar, so learning about Jons Jakob Berzelius and Catalysts was another favorite of Issacs. This experiment compared yeast and vinegar to baking soda and vinegar. Going along with that experiment was the lesson on Amedeo Avogadro. In this experiment we learned about the weight of gas!

One of the experiments I found interesting was How do you dew? that was part of the lesson on William Charles Wells. In this experiment we we used 3 different cans, salt, water and ice.

Another interesting experiment was about an important type of chemical in many foods. In this lesson we learned about William Prout and food. We used a brown bag, a potato, cheese and butter.