Weird Science

School has taken a backseat this week. We were having tremendous trouble with Science last week...we were supposed to learn about bones, the skeleton, joints, the skull and teeth. The next unit was on muscles, the heart and the brain. We put together a small paper skeleton and went through the provided lesson, but David was listless and deathly bored, and at the end he couldn't answer a single question on the test correctly. I was livid, he was frustrated. We dropped it for the day, but I was thoroughly ready to pack it in and cancel the program.

That night I looked up some stuff on the 'net, thinking that I CAN'T be the only person to encounter such resistance. Of course I'm not. Most people said they ran into this when they tried to make homeschool too much like School At Home. Same paperwork, same stuff as school, just in your living room instead of a classroom.

I jumped ahead in the lessons and extracted some cool ideas...I bent a cardboard paper towel in half like an elbow joint, and taped deflated balloons to the top and bottom of the fold to make stretchy ''muscles'' that pulled taut or relaxed depending on how the joint bent. I also printed out the test questions for both units and went to bed with a plan.

The next morning I got everyone dressed and fed them a big breakfast and asked if anyone wanted to go to the Science Center. They completely freaked out with joy and we took off.

I happened to have a two-for-one coupon for the new BJC SportsWorks exhibit at the Science Center. It seemed to focus on the human body and all the cool stuff it can do, so I figured I'd tie the material in on one of the proverbial ''field trips.''

The first part was a lot of Cardinals stuff, which nobody in our house really cares about. (I think my St Louis residency can be revoked for making that statement!) The rest, however, was right on the money.

There was a rock-climbing wall (which he will NOT participate in!) and a pitching ''cage,'' where they measured the speed of your pitch. They also had plastic models of arms, joints, tendons, and how they move during a pitch.

There was a balancing beam and mirror surrounded by big mats, videos of different athletes doing some amazing feats of balance, and a huge model of the inner ear which you could spin around and experiment with to see how the fluid moved.

There was a place where you could race down a track against your choice of a T-Rex, Cheetah, or Olympic athlete. The system would shine a light on the wall in the shape of the competitor you picked, and the figure would move along the wall at the speed it would naturally travel while you ran down the track.

There was a section on weight-lifting, a very neat bicycle on a loop-de-loop which allowed you to experience G-force, a thing on dancing, a virtual game for volleyball and soccer...and then there was the little grocery store.

As you might expect, Schnucks put this one together. Here there were kid-sized shelves and dairy cases and meat cases and produce stands full of plastic food. You got to take a little plastic grocery basket and ''shop.'' So we talked about whether bones and muscles are alive or not, and if they need to eat, and assigned the kids the task of picking out the most healthy lunch for their bones and muscles that they could think of. After they ran around and picked lots of stuff, we went through each item and asked ourselves if it was healthy or not: ''Would our bones and muscles like to eat this? So should we eat this?'' For the record, we decided that fresh meats and veggies were healthy, but that our bones and muscles probably wouldn't ask for Nilla Wafers and chocolate syrup.

There was a kid's play area which they thought was nifty. So I sat for awhile and let them play around, then during a relatively calm period I sat on the floor and called David over. He sat on my lap and I asked if he had ever heard of a thing called a heart, and if he knew where it was.
''Now, what's your heart FOR?'' I asked.
''To LOVE people!'' he beamed.
''YES!'' I told him, ''That's right! It also happens do something very important for your body, too.''
I grabbed his hand and held it over his heart.
''Do you feel that?''
He was awed that he felt something actually moving.
''Now, go climb up over there and I want you to jump from there over to there, ten times, as fast as you can.''

He giggled and ran over and started climbing and jumping, but declared boredom after about seven jumps. So I had him leap around over something else and he soon started panting. I snatched him up quick and grabbed his hand and put it back over his heart without saying a word. I held it there, and suddenly his eyes went wide and he yelped "Faster! It's faster!" This of course went to a quick explanation of heart rates and exercise and playing.

There was only one room left in the exhibit. We walked in and I immediately spied a skeleton...the plastic kind that you'd associate with medical school, all assembled with wires and stuck on a metal pole, just sort of dangling there. PERFECT! We shook the skeleton's hand, we bent the arm and wrist joints, we looked at the joints on the jaw, we opened his skull and contemplated what might be housed inside.

The rest of the room was filled with tables; all the tabletops were shaped like a human body, and on top of each was a laminated, basic schematic of where the various systems of the body are located. One table was all bones, and on top was a cardboard Halloween-decoration-type skeleton which we got to put together. Another table showed the circulatory system, and we talked about the heart and all the little "pipes" that carry blood around. Another was the digestive system, another showed all the muscles in the body.

Eventually we got bored of all of this, too, and headed back to the car. While I was waiting for David to buckle his seatbelt, I pulled out the test questions from the previous day as well as the ones for this test and casually posed them to him.

He answered each of them easily and readily.

We spent the whole day on Science and didn't get to any other subject that day, but I think he definitely mastered the concepts!