The flu close up and personal

I wanted to share a GREAT site with you today. Take a look at the flu close up by CLICKING HERE.

This site is a blog created to be a unique health information source. The graphics are great and a fantastic resource for teaching your kids about the SCIENCE of this flu!

Breathe!

We have been talking a lot about H1N1 around our house, taking precautions, limiting interaction with families where we know someone is sick, and of course, we have scrubbed our own fingerprints off washing our hands. So what can we learn as we talk about swine flu? Well, the subjects are actually endless. The last few days we have discussed forensics, actually figuring out ways that the flu can be spread from person to person, thinking about how many people we come in contact with each and every day, but the REALLY interesting subjects can come from talking about WHAT the flu does.

Trying to explain to my kids that the flu is a respiratory illness was pretty pointless until I could explain to them what RESPIRATORY was.

Have your kids ever asked how do you breathe? What are lungs? What do they look like and how do they work? Have you ever wondered this yourself? Here is a super simple, super easy project to explain this.

SUPPLIES:

One 1-liter or 1-quart clear plastic bottle ( a good way to recycle those water bottles!)
One large balloon
One small balloon
Two rubber bands
One straw
Modeling clay

DIRECTIONS:

1. Cut off the bottom of the bottle. You can use a serrated knife, a utility knife, or scissors … what ever sharp instrument you use, please use standard safety rules.
2. Cut the neck off of the large balloon.
3. Stretch this balloon over the bottom of the bottle. Put a rubber band around it to hold it in place.
4. Insert the straw into the neck of the balloon.
5. Tie the balloon to the straw using the other rubber band.
6. Put the balloon end of the straw into the bottle so that the balloon is all the way into the bottle but does not touch the balloon over the bottom of the bottle.
7. Secure the straw in the bottle by using the modeling clay. Make sure the clay completely covers the mouth of the bottle, but does not crimp the straw.
8. Push on the rubber at the bottom of the bottle. What happens? Is this like breathing in or out?
9. Pull the rubber down. Which way would you be breathing now?

What happens? The stretched balloon across the bottom of the bottle acts like a diaphragm. This is the flat muscle at the bottom of the chest cavity. This muscle forces air in and out of your lungs. Your lungs do not inflate or deflate by themselves … a muscle, your diaphragm, is pulling or pushing so that you can breathe.

Happy Thanksgiving Everybody!

Home School Expo

We have added the RSS feed from the Chicago Home School Expo to the blog site! You can see the latest updates regarding the expo to your right under the Flu.gov box. For more information about the Expo, CLICK HERE.

Thanksgiving Weather

I love history. Really, ANY history. The problem with history is that I have a hard time teaching it to my kids sometimes. I fear that in a microwave society where everything is about the next minute, what happened 300 years ago sometimes gets lost in the shuffle.

There are a ton of blogs out there on homeschool sites right now talking about activities surrounding the “Being thankful” theme, so I wanted to do something different. As always, I can teach almost subject as long as I can relate it to severe weather, so let’s take a look at Thanksgiving weather and see if we can find a way to teach history to the kiddies during the holiday week ahead…

We can pull almost any book off the shelf in our homes and quickly show the children that the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock, but can we tell them why?

The Pilgrims actually made the decision to land on the shores of Massachusetts because of the weather! At the time that the ship was was passing the southeastern tip of Cape Cod, the wind and waves pushed the crews to make landfall to save the ship from the turbulent seas! You see, the folks on the Mayflower originally intended on going all the way to New York Harbor. The Mayflower only weighed about 180 tons, which seems large, but if you compare it to ships of today was actually not large at all! On November 19, 1620, the ship found itself in the dangerous shoals east of Monomoy Point.

MONOMOY POINT

With a south wind, the Pilgrims were able to backtrack northward and using the wind for two more days finally made it to Provincetown Harbor after 65 days at sea! According to historical reports, the Pilgrims knew they were in trouble, for the weather had forced them to land in a place they were very unfamiliar with no place for them to take shelter. The reputation of the North American winters had been widely spread back home…

While the winter was mild that year, the beginning of December was not. This made it very difficult for the Pilgrims to explore the strange land they had “found” by way of foul weather. By December 7th, the ground was covered with snow and frozen solid. Some reports say the snow was at least 6 inches deep. As if things could not get worse, the wind became so bad on the 17th of December that old journals say the Pilgrims were coated with ice from the ocean spray.

Imagine wind, snow and ice in New England in mid-December! Remember, there was no place to live!

Exploration parties were formed and they went out in search of shelter and on the 18th, it began to snow and rain. YUCK! The search for a sheltered location continued through December 18 and 19 when the decision was made to actually land the boat at Plymouth Rock, thus ending the trip on December 21 from a small rowboat and not from the larger Mayflower.

For the record, the Pilgrims stepped foot on a sandy beach despite the location’s name!

Why the rowboat? With wicked weather and an unknown land ahead, the women and children were left on the Mayflower and only ten men rowed to shore. Hostile natives were definitely a concern…

Once satisfied that Plymouth Rock was the best place to weather the new world’s weather, the small crew went back to the Mayflower and everyone came to Plymouth on the Mayflower on December 26 where a decision was made to start the colony right there.

PLYMOUTH

The winter of 1620-'21 was "a calm winter, such as was never seen here since," wrote Thomas Dudley of Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Edward Winslow, one of the original Pilgrims, also wrote about the "remarkable mildness" of that first winter in “Good Newes From New England” published in 1624. There was testimony by others to a mild end of December, a moderate January, a brief cold spell with sleet and some snow in early February, followed by definitely mild conditions and an early spring.

Despite the generally warmer than normal conditions, almost half of the original passengers and crew of the Mayflower succumbed to disease during the first winter on the shores of Massachusetts and Cape Cod Bay.

Could it have been because of their journey through bad weather as well? Records show that most of the Pilgrims came ashore with HORRIBLE coughs at Plymouth!

Many lived on board the Mayflower anchored a mile-and-a-half offshore and went to the land each day, weather permitting, to build adequate shelters. It was wet and windy most of that winter, but thankfully little snow came after the Pilgrims landed.

There are not many more records of the weather from the Pilgrim’s early days here, and it is thought that this was a marketing issue; you see, if they wrote home about harsh winters, nobody else would come!

WEATHER IN NEW ENGLAND

Are you watching the weather this week in New England?

MASSACHUSETTS MAP

Look at the map of Massachusetts and journal this week’s weather! Could you have made the last of the journey? Would the Pilgrims have gotten a wind from the south this year? What would the weather have been this year for the Pilgrims? What’s the long term forecast for the next 30 days? How many obstacles did the Pilgrims face and how many of them were worsened because of weather?

What might have changed if the Pilgrims had landed at New York where there was businesses, shelter and trade already?

How many historical moments in history have been governed by weather?

Watch your mouth!

Touring the country I get to hear a lot of cool things out of kid's mouths. As a parent, I know that sometimes not everything that comes out of a child's mouth is funny, especially when they are repeating something they heard you say that you shouldn't have...

I have gotten several hundred letters from kids in the last several months, most of them are from school children I met on tour. I love the things they remembered and laugh at how they focused on the LEAST important thing out of a 90 minute assembly.

One letter I got recently from a girl that attended a 90 minute presentation for her 5th grade class was this:

"Thanks for coming. I liked your boots!"

Here's another:

I learned alot about bad weather like when you said you still get scared!"

It is what makes children fun isn't it? It reminds me that they ARE listening. ALL the time...just not to what we THINK they are listening to...be careful what you say!

I remember the show "Kids say the darndest things" and was a big fan so I was excited to find a list of things kids have said about science that they THOUGHT they had learned at school.

Enjoy!

• "One horsepower is the amount of energy it takes to drag a horse 500 feet in one second."

• "You can listen to thunder after lightning and tell how close you came to getting hit. If you don't hear it, you got hit, so never mind."

• "Talc is found on rocks and on babies."

• "Isn't inertia when something is moving, then it stops moving and keeps moving?"

• "The law of gravity says no fair jumping up without coming back down."

• "When they broke open molecules, they found they were only stuffed with atoms. But when they broke open atoms, they found them stuffed with explosions."

• "When people run around and around in circles we say they are crazy. When planets do it we say they are orbiting."

• "Rainbows are just to look at, not to really understand."

• "While the earth seems to be knowingly keeping its distance from the sun, it is really only centrificating."

• "Someday we may discover how to make magnets that can point in any direction."

• "South America has cold summers and hot winters, but somehow they still manage."

• "Water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212 degrees. There are 180 degrees between freezing and boiling because there are 180 degrees between north and south."

• "A vibration is a motion that cannot make up its mind which way it wants to go."

• "There are 26 vitamins in all, but some of the letters are yet to be discovered. Finding them all means living forever."

• "There is a tremendous weight pushing down on the center of the Earth because of so much population stomping around up there these days."

• "Lime is a green-tasting rock."

• "Many dead animals in the past changed to fossils, while others preferred to be oil."

• "Genetics explain why you look like your father, and if you don't why you should."

• "Vacuums are nothings. We only mention them to let them know we know they're there."

• "Some oxygen molecules help fires burn, while others help make water, so sometimes it's brother against brother."

• "Some people can tell what time it is by looking at the sun. But I have never been able to make out the numbers."

• "We say the cause of perfume disappearing is evaporation. Evaporation gets blamed for a lot of things people forget to put the top on."

• "To most people, solutions mean finding the answers. But to chemists, solutions are things that are still all mixed up."

• "In looking at a drop of water under a microscope, we find there are twice as many H's as O's."

• "Clouds are high flying fogs."

• "I am not sure how clouds get formed. But the clouds know how to do it, and that is the important thing."

• "Clouds just keep circling the earth around and around. And around. There is not much else to do."

• "Water vapor gets together in a cloud. When it is big enough to be called a drop, it does."

• "Humidity is the experience of looking for air and finding water."

• "We keep track of the humidity in the air so we won't drown when we breathe."

• "Rain is often known as soft water, oppositely known as hail."

• "Rain is saved up in cloud banks."

• "In some rocks you can find the fossil footprints of fishes."

• "Cyanide is so poisonous that one drop of it on a dog's tongue will kill the strongest man."

• "The wind is like the air, only pushier."

• "A blizzard is when it snows sideways."

• "A hurricane is a breeze of a bigly size."

• "A monsoon is a French gentleman."

• "Thunder is a rich source of loudness."

• "Isotherms and isobars are even more important than their names sound."

• "It is so hot in some places that the people there have to live in other places."

• "Most books now say our sun is a star. But it still knows how to change back into a sun in the daytime."

We are pretty excited about what has been happening around the office. New sponsors are calling, and more importantly, more schools, more libraries, more agencies. It looks like 2010 could be the best year we have ever had here at Chasing4Life and we know it is because of the many friends that we have made and met over the last two years. Your recommendations, your word-of-mouth advertising on our behalf is spreading the word like a wildfire in high winds.
Our blog numbers are up, our homeschool numbers are up, our web hits are up.
If you have not yet called or emailed to see when we are in your area, NOW IS THE TIME to do it! Our tours are filling up and the new programs for 2010 look better than any we have ever had. So far, we have dates lining up in at least 20 states (see map)! We have NEVER had interest this widespread this early in the season before!
Looking forward to a great year with more opportunities than ever before...creating a more resilient America one community at a time!

Homeschooling the sick

I wanted to share this as soon as I heard about. I felt that it validated some of the reasons for homeschooling, but even more so, supported programs we have been trying to create here at Chasing4Life. I found this to VERY exciting that National Geographic was stepping up like this!

Here's the news release:

Washington, D.C. - As the nation heeds the significance of President Obama’s declaration of a national emergency to deal with the H1N1 flu, educators are bracing for the possibility of widespread impact on student learning as a result of the virus. National Geographic Channel (NGC) and National Geographic School Publishing (NGSP) are responding to the urgent call of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to provide continuity of learning to keep students, sick or well, engaged in meaningful education activities if they are kept home during flu season. To help address the needs of students who will be impacted, NGC and NGSP today announced the launch of a special programming block and free education resources that will be made available during what is expected to be peak flu season.

Beginning November 16, NGC will air two-hour programming blocks from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. ET, weekdays, over a six-week period, as well as provide select programs available anytime online at www.natgeotv.com/education. All programs in this educational block will be complemented with free Web-based activity guides and resources provided by NGSP via a special "continuity of learning" portal, National Geographic Home Zone (www.NGSP.com/homezone). The G-rated programming will be culled from the network’s award-winning specials and ongoing series, including Explorer, Naked Science and Wild Spaces, while the educational materials will be suitable for elementary, middle school and high school students, applicable to science, social studies and other disciplines. The intent is to provide students who are absent from school with opportunities to engage in a relevant learning experience.

Commenting on this announcement, John Fahey, president and CEO of National Geographic, said, "This effort underscores the commitment of National Geographic to partner with educators and parents, and is totally consistent with our mission of inspiring people to care about the planet. The National Geographic Channel and our school publishing unit are in a unique position to bring relevant learning resources into homes during the flu season. We hope students of all ages will both enjoy and benefit from the wonderfully engaging programs and related materials being offered"

Sci Tech Unveiling

We are now getting pictures from the SciTech unveiling of Dorothy in her new home. We have posted a brief story up on the website if you would like to see it. Just CLICK HERE.
We would like to thank John Gudenas, David James, Mayor Tom Weisner and the other folks from Aurora that helped make this possible.
Special thanks this week goes to Dan Bocklund who has worked very hard the last week at the museum and will be completing construction of the display alongside of the museum.

They Did Their Share

On Veteran’s Day we honor
Soldiers who protect our nation.
For their service as our warriors,
They deserve our admiration.

Some of them were drafted;
Some were volunteers;
For some it was just yesterday;
For some it’s been many years;

In the jungle or the desert,
On land or on the sea,
They did whatever was assigned
To produce a victory.

Some came back; some didn’t.
They defended us everywhere.
Some saw combat; some rode a desk;
All of them did their share.

No matter what the duty,
For low pay and little glory,
These soldiers gave up normal lives,
For duties mundane and gory.

Let every veteran be honored;
Don’t let politics get in the way.
Without them, freedom would have died;
What they did, we can’t repay.

We owe so much to them,
Who kept us safe from terror,
So when we see a uniform,
Let’s say "thank you" to every wearer.

By Joanna Fuchs

HOMESCHOOL EXPOS

Make sure you check out the new page on the website this week! Chasing4Life will be at the Southeast Homeschool Expo and the Chicago Homeschool Expo!
CLICK HERE!

Why be different?

Being on the road the last few days and dealing with the business end of things, I have found little time to write for this blog (or any of my other blogs for that matter). I did find time to browse through some recommended articles and happened upon a GREAT article I think is well worth reading, so as you patiently wait for my next tidbit of wisdom or creative idea, please make sure you read this article by Wendy McMillian:

The Nile River - located in the Sudan and Egypt in Africa - is an interesting river. What makes this river so interesting and unusual as compared to other rivers? Unlike the majority of the world's waterways, the Nile flows from south to north.

The Nile is the life of the desert. Many boats and ships travel its waters to make trade in cities found along its banks. Many natives farm along the bank of the Nile because of the rich soil and available water. At 4,160 miles long, the Nile is one of the longest rivers in the world, beginning its journey at Lake Victoria, and ending at the Mediterranean Sea.

Although the river seems to defy gravity by flowing from south to north, it actually is flowing downhill. It is not the mystery it appears to be. Lake Victoria, where the river begins, is located high in the mountains of East Central Africa. Its course is downhill from there.

Home schooling is not the mystery it appears to be either. It has actually been around for many centuries, in many forms. All through history, children have been taught skills and trades by older family members. Family history and heritage have been handed down through generations of teachings. Home schooling could be traced back as early as Adam and Eve when they taught their children.

But why home school your children today? Why not just send them away and let someone else do the teaching? In short, why be different? The answer is actually quite simple: Because lessons are just waiting to be learned in the life that surrounds us...

CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE ARTICLE

We lost a friend

A good friend of Chasing4Life passed away this weekend and we are truly mourning his passing. John Bernardi (Nov 21, 1950-Oct 31, 2009) was the Branch Manager of the Washington Branch Library in Omaha. He was also the editor of NLAQ, board member of The Literacy Center of Omaha, member of the American Library Association and also the Public Library Association. John believed in Chasing4Life and did his best to promote our events and the message of disaster preparedness. He was fun to work with, scattered in many directions at all times, and made learning fun for everyone he came in contact with. John was one of those librarians that REALLY believed in the power of a book and that passion is what we will miss the most.
Rest In Peace, John.

Time Change

How many clocks did you have to set back in your house? Alot?

Your cellular phones probably did it themselves, but the worst is sometimes the one in the car! For a while, none of the clocks in my house matched! Did you ever wonder when this started? Here's today's lesson:

The idea of daylight saving was first conceived by Benjamin Franklin. During a trip to Paris in 1784, Franklin wrote an essay called "An Economical Project". Some of Franklin's friends, inventors of a new kind of oil lamp, were so taken by the scheme that they continued corresponding with Franklin even after he returned to America.
The idea was first advocated seriously by London builder William Willett (1857-1915) in the pamphlet, "Waste of Daylight" (1907), that proposed advancing clocks 20 minutes on each of four Sundays in April, and setting them back by the same amount on four Sundays in September.

As he was taking an early morning ride through Petts Wood, near Croydon, the builder was struck by the fact that the blinds of nearby houses were closed, even though the sun was fully up!

Willet wrote: "Everyone appreciates the long, light evenings. Everyone laments their shortage as Autumn approaches; and everyone has given utterance to regret that the clear, bright light of an early morning during Spring and Summer months is so seldom seen or used."

Willet spent most of the rest of his life trying to convince the government that Daylight Savings made sense. He died still being made fun of...

Wanna know the rest?

CLICK HERE FOR THE WHOLE STORY