This year in science we have been studying ocean creatures using Exploring Creation with Zoology 2: Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day from Apologia Science, which we are enjoying very much!  With this text, I also bought one Notebooking Journal that follows the text and includes questions, crossword puzzles, and mini-books for each chapter.

Apologia books are faith-based texts that are packed with lots of information and science experiments for each lesson.  Throughout the Apologia books, they recognize that our awesome Creator made the world around us and He made wonderful creatures on land and sea.  It is amazing to study God's wonders through this great science curriculum!

I decided to buy the Zoology 2: Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day Deluxe Science Kit at the beginning of the school year from Creation Sensation so all the experiment materials would be gathered for me and mailed to my door.  Each Apologia text does include an extensive materials list at the beginning of the books, but I wanted to save time from hunting down items by purchasing the kit. I was excited to win the Apologia Anatomy Science Kit this past summer through Creation Sensation's Facebook page!  I'm thinking since I already have the science kit, I'll do Anatomy next year.

One item that was in our kit that corresponds with Lesson 8: Crustaceans is an envelope of sea monkey or triop eggs.  Triops, sometimes called tadpole shrimp (not true shrimp ,but shrimp-like) are tiny crustaceans that can stay inside their eggs for many years in a dry state.  They only hatch if they have been dried first.  It's when we followed the directions on the envelope and dumped the eggs into water in our small habitat pictured above, that our triops hatched and began swimming around.  We have  4 of these little creatures swimming around and my son was especially happy to see them hatch since he was the one who worried the most that we somehow killed them! Unfortunately, these crustaceans only live a few months, so we are enjoying them while we can.
On page 171 of the Zoology 2: Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day, there is a science experiment in the cephalopod chapter to learn about buoyancy. On yesterday's post, I came up with Water Art, using the eyedropper that was used for this experiment. The above picture shows the textbook open to where the experiment is with the materials used: glass of water, water bottle filled with water, 2 different eyedroppers decorated with google eyes and orange and yellow chenille sticks.

The idea was to fill the eyedropper with a little bit of water by placing it inside the glass and squeezing and then put it into the water bottle.  Here is the eyedropper in the glass of water:

After we put the eyedropper in the water bottle and closed the lid tightly, my children squeezed the bottle really hard so the eyedropper sunk (because water rushed into the eyedropper, making it heavier) and then the eyedropper rose to the top when they released the pressure, water rushed out of the eyedropper, making it lighter.
We were very excited that this experiment worked and my son was so happy when he saw the sinking and rising of the eyedropper for the first time!  I was glad we got the same results as the book since I get frustrated when experiments don't go as they should! :)

This easy and quick experiment was used to explain that some cephalopods, (what's a cephalopod? It's in the text, of course) like the nautilus, can control their buoyancy like we demonstrated with the bottle of water and the eyedropper.  Nautiluses can take in water, which makes them heavier, then makes them sink, or they can expel water to become lighter, and they rise in the ocean water.  The book mentioned that submarines do the same thing when they fills tanks with ocean water to sink and then submarines push water out of the tanks to rise.

Please join Lynda, Anna-Marie and myself for April's No Ordinary Blog Hop (NOBH). You can link up any or all your posts for the entire month of April. The blogger with the most posts will be awarded a Star Blogger Award!  Click below for details!