These lyrics remind us of the folly of Odysseus' silly crew and their willingness to eat anything that wasn't nailed down, including the cows of the sun god, which they had been specifically told not to eat. The song is sung to the tune of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" by Gordon Lightfoot. If you don't have this song on CD, go to Project Playlist and search for it, then add it to your playlist and listen to it whenever you like!

The legend lives on from the Athenians on down
Of the big sea they call the Aegean
The sea, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the face of Poseidon is seething.

Odysseus set out with his faithful old crew
From the war with the Trojans they’d beaten
Those bright ships and the crew were just bones to be chewed
By the gales and the gods and the seasons

Odysseus was the pride of the Ithacan isle
Where his wife and his son were there waiting
and all through the years of Odysseus’ exile
One hundred young suitors placating.

They raided the island of Ismaros
And left all the villagers reeling
And later that night when the ships bell rang
Could it be the West Wind they'd been feeling.

They resisted the lotus and poked the Cyclops
but opened the bag from Aeolus.
Lost all but one ship to Laestrygonian chops
but handled witch Circe with boldness.

They fought through the dangers to follow their vows
when they came to Thranacia island
And there on the green were the sun god’s cows
From their nice sunny pasture they beckoned.



Does anyone know why they ate those cows?
Why they couldn’t just leave them there grazing?
Eating goat meat would not have made Helios mad
Yet they ate beef — is that not amazing?

The wind in the sails made a tattletale sound
And a wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as Odysseus did, too,
T'was Poseidon’s waters come stealing.

The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
With the Mediterranean slashing
When afternoon came it was freezing rain
In the face of old Zeus’ fierce lashing

Odysseus sighed and he nearly died
For the good ship and crew was in peril
The rest of the crew must have sunk with the ship
Wishing they’d eaten something more feral.

Labels: ancient civilizations, classical literature, educational songs, gordon lightfoot, odysseus, odyssey, songs

Another song about physics for elementary school!

Here's a link to the song sheet as a PDF:

Here are the lyrics:

MY TRUE SCREW

A screw is a shaft with a helical groove
Or thread wound around it in a helical way
You use a screwdriver to make the screw move
Righty tighty, lefty loosey,” as Joshua would say

Chorus:
Screw Screw Screw!
Are you a true simple machine?Or are you just another helical inclined plane?

A screw translates torque into linear force
When you turn it, that’s torque but it doesn’t just spin
It also goes straight down — that’s linear of course
“What goes around goes down!” say the Silverberg twins

Chorus

The drive of the screw is the slot in its top
Where you put the screwdriver to turn it around
It might be a cross, a line, square, or teardrop
“A proper tool for every job,” as Benny has found.

Chorus

Have you heard of Archimedes
He perfected a wonderful screw
To lift water or an object up
Like a golf ball, or a hot turnip

A screw inside a pipe
Is a screw of a mechanical type
A screw with a point on one end
Is a fastener screw, my dearest friend

Note: There are specific names in the song, which obviously would have to be changed to your children's names. To replace "The Silverberg Twins" with one name (if you don't have twins in your group) just say "says Rudolph again" or whatever name you need.

And here's the video, in which I completely bargled the lyrics, but as long as I have children to jump on my head and correct me, who cares:

Labels: educational songs, learning with music, lego league, science, screws, songs

Preparing to teach Benny's Lego League team about levers, I realized that I myself knew nothing about levers. I vaguely recalled that a crowbar is one, and that force times distance equals knit one purl two Francis Bacon. Beyond that, I was in the dark. When I was 18, I took a class called University Physics, where these things were probably discussed. OR maybe not. The people in my class may have all been well beyond the study of simple machines. Maybe I was too, at the time.

What I chiefly remember about University Physics was that I was in the middle of trying to get my school to boycott table grapes and thereby save the world from injustice. I'm pretty sure I missed a few labs and maybe even the final. I got an A the first semester, a B the second semester, and from there things got really bad and I ended up an English major. I'm sure my physics professor wanted to crack my head like a nut on several occasions. I was a terrible student. Really terrible in an epic, timeless way. Rotten. At the time, calculus was giving me hives.

Anyway, now that I have two bright young students on my roster and am no longer so completely absorbed in electric guitars and oppressed peoples, I went to the library and learned about levers. And, because I am me, I wrote a song about it to teach this info to the children.

Here is a link to a PDF of the song sheet lyrics:

Here are the lyrics:

LEVER LA LA LA

In a first class lever, the fulcrum is between
The force and the mighty load
Which might be water or a kid named Jean
You use a first class lever to paddle a canoe
A seesaw or a scissors or the
Shoehorn in your shoe

Chorus:
LA LA LEVER
La-la-la-la-la-LEVER
Your load is so heavy and your fulcrum is fixed
But LA LA LEVER
La-la-la-la-la-LEVER
If I apply some force today
We can lever all your troubles away

That's not all the levers we've got
Let's give the second class lever a shot

In a second class lever the force is at one end
The fulcrum's at the other end
The load is in the middle but the bar won't bend
A door is a second class lever, and a wheelbarrow's one too
If you like to use a nutcracker
Try lever number two!

Chorus

That's not all the levers we've got
Let's give the third class lever a shot

In a third class lever it's the fulcrum, then the force
Then the load on the other side
Which might be an apple or a stick or a horse
Your arms are third class levers, your legs are levers too
And shovels, slings, and spoons
When you use them to fling food.

Chorus

And here is a video of the Legodiles (plus one extra little brother) singing the lever song:



Here's my chance to publicly apologize to Dr. Fulcher for being a rotten student. Homeschooling a seven-year-old is a perfect chance to start over on physics, and this time I'm paying attention.

Labels: educational songs, learning with music, levers, physics, science, songs, teaching

This summer at Phi Bensa Zoe Academy (our homeschooling mini-co-op that we engage in with one other family and their similarly aged children) the senior class (first grade students) have been studying cell biology. We learned the parts of a bacteria cell, the parts of plant and animal cells, and now we're learning about cell division. Here are two of our projects:

We found our first cell model project at a Library Thinkquest site. You make a cell model out of a Ziploc baggie, Karo syrup, and candies. Splendid. We used a plastic easter egg for the nucleus with yarn inside to represent the DNA. We used small balloons for the vacuoles, making the plant cells have big ones, the animal cells smaller ones. We made our bacteria cells with only ribosomes and yarn.

Letting the kids make their own choices as to what candies to use for what organelles was very interesting. Also, we had our first lesson with the saying, "No model is perfect; every model should be useful" since all our model cells were squares and obviously, ribosomes aren't lemon drops.



Here are our plant cells:



The next models we made were of clay. We used Das clay, which I love, although it does make more of a mess than Crayola Model Magic or other "kid" clays. Das really feels like clay, to me, and the fact that it leaves a little clay on your hands is a benefit. Not a benefit to the pipes under the sink, Dan will be happy to remind me.

We made our plant, animal, and bacteria cell shapes, then added the clay organelles. Then we painted the cells, hot-glued them to a very glamorous and impressive gold plaque (spraypainted in the yard on the now-gold grass) and spray varnished the whole thing. Now the grass is gold *and* shiny! Dan will recall that he never liked the grass anyway.

Benny's project:



Zoe's project:



You'll notice that Zoe, who has declared her major as shepherding at the tender age of 7, has included the "lamb" cell, along with the other three. Excellent.

We've learned three songs to go with our study of cells, and I'll include one of them here. The others will have to wait until our next recording session, yo!



Cells are composed of organelles
Kept inside a membrane, given shape by vacuoles!
All living things are made of these
Building blocks of life; they're bio-legos if you please!

That's what makes a cell
All the organelles
Work together well
That's what makes a cell

Plant cells can photosynthesize
Using chlorophyll to turn the sunlight into french fries
Chloroplasts make plant cells green inside
They make food from water, light, and sweet carbon dioxide

(Chorus)

When it is time to reproduce
Centrioles divide the nucleus into a deuce
Chromosomes, made up of DNA,
Line up to be pulled apart, to make two cells today.

(Chorus)

Ribosomes put together proteins
Golgi bodies package up the proteins
Lysosomes get rid of the garbage
They all use the endoplasmic reticulum highway!

(Chorus)

Cells, mon!

***
Interested in more Little Blue Ideas? Try the Idea Box for homeschooling ideas and more.

Labels: biology, cells, educational songs, learning with music, lessons, phi bensa zoe, science