an eyeball dissection

It has been months since my last post. Terrible! I kept thinking to myself, "I should really write something," but then life got in the way. For any of you who have kids at home, whether they are big or small, you know what I mean. If I get 10 minutes to myself, I am usually in the bathroom (although it's rare to be alone in there), sleeping (actually, there are usually kids there too), or trying to read one of the many books in my "to-read" pile (which are mostly about raising kids). Hmmm...

Since I last posted, we have done a million fun and interesting things, and there is no way I could write about all of them. But because I mentioned Ella's fascination with the eyeball in my last post, I thought I'd share a little about our eyeball dissection!

When Ella first told me she wanted to look inside an eye, I checked the internet to see if I could get an eyeball from somewhere. Educational supply website? Butcher? I didn't really know where to start. I mentioned my quest to a friend of mine who teaches at a public school, in the hopes that she might know where her school gets their eyeballs from. She did even better than that, though; she brought us two eyeballs from her school! When I showed them to the kids, they were so excited to cut into them.

We put on some gloves (which were kind of big for the kids, as I don't think they make "little kid" sized latex gloves), spread out some cardboard on the kitchen table (sorry to those of you who have eaten at my table since then), and got to work. At first the kids were reluctant to touch the eyeballs, but they soon got into it. We used the iPad to look up the names for all the parts of the eye, and how to cut into it. I had done this dissection when I was 13 or 14, but I don't even want to tell you how many years it's been since then, so needless to say, I had no idea what I was doing. But we figured it out, we learned together, and we had so much fun. Ella loved seeing and holding the lens, but asked that next time we cut something up, that it be something "less slimy."

I love unschooling!