White powders and hot air

This is P. My first blog post. I want to post a little about our latest Saturday Science sessions before they get overtaken by the next and greatest. A couple of weeks ago we looked at "white powders" to find out why the sky is blue, why sunsets are red and how to make sherbert. A small amount of milk powder in water scatters light just like the atmosphere does. Blue light is bendiest and scatters the most in all directions as light passes across, including down to us - so the sky seems blue (on the moon, without an atmosphere, you would look up during the day and see a black sky!). As the torch light passes through more and more milky glasses, less and less blue is left until the remaining light looks quite red/orange. This is like sunset, when the sun is low in the sky and is passing through the most atmosphere of the day, on its way to us.

photo by RL

The other white powders we played with were citric acid and baking soda. When mixed with water they fizz as carbon dioxide is produced. We added icing sugar and flavoured jelly crystals for some delicious lemon, lime or creaming soda sherbert.

photo by RL

This week we looked at "moving hot air". RL set up a couple of great demos. The first had heat from a flame rising and causing a paper spiral to spin in the breeze. The second took a bottle from the freezer filled with ice cold air. As the air warms up out of the freezer it starts to expand and blow up a balloon. Heating the bottle expands the air even more and the balloon continues to grow.

spiral spinning in the heat

balloon inflating as bottle warms up

balloon inflating more when bottle is put under warm running water

Is it over yet?

Our garden is full of beautiful flowers this week.  Here are two lovelies - Miss Ginger Lily and Madam Grevillea:

We've been spending time in the garden planning our vegetable garden. So far we have one unexpected tomato plant growing on the back fence and our neighbour's beans tumbling over our side fence.  Hey, growing veges is easy!

This week was an exhausting whirlwind of never ending activities.  Apart from our usual stuff,  the girls began a new art class at Wyreena Art Centre which was a big hit with them and with me (lovely cafe on site!) and we also went roller skating with a group of new friends.  H  took the train into town with  Grandma and visited the museum while R and I caught up with C, J and E in their new house.
Saturday saw another Saturday Science Session and a trip to Berwick for the Berwick Show where Oma had entered several woven items and won 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes. Yay for Oma!

IYC 2011

We've just discovered that this year is the International Year of Chemistry.  P is very happy of course, and so will the girls be when we revisit our old friend the Periodic Table.  We have found lots of fun stuff to look at and work on, including a Periodic Table quiz here and loads of great element videos here and on YouTube like this one:

I've been feeling that we're just a bit biased towards the sciences, so last week R worked hard at her Headsprout reading and we started some maths using the MAB blocks which surprised her a little as she thinks they are for building houses for her Sylvannian Families!

H read some library books and wrote two acrostic poems entitled "Pig" and "Dance" using this site.
I busied myself sewing some more sandwich wraps which I will list in my new Madeit store as soon as I can.
This coming week P will be away all week on camp so us girls have decided to start decorating the cubby to keep it as spider free as we can. Yesterday we picked our own apples through the cubby window - what joy!  And our tomato plant has wee green tomatoes growing too :)

I managed to identify the lovely spider we found at the apple orchard. She (I think she is female as she was quite big)  is a Garden Orb Weaver aka Eriophora transmarina.

Time

 What I love most about homeschooling is having time to do those small things that bring so much happiness and contentment. On Monday, instead of going to Halliday Park, we visited an apple orchard owned by a homeschool family.  There were eight other families there, half of whom we didn't know very well.  Within minutes all the children were having a wonderful time either picking apples, patting rabbits or playing hide and seek. 

First we found a magnificent spider busy wrapping a bee in silk for her dinner.

Then we headed off down the orchard of 800 apple trees to pick some fruit.

 When everyone had picked enough the children organised themselves to chop and juice the apples, while the adults looked on impatient for a taste!

 

 Then it was time to eat and relax in the sunshine.

It was a fantastic day. The girls said they'd like to go there everyday and I quite agree.

At the zoo

We had a lovely day today at the dentist. It really was lovely - the girls adore their dentist Jennifer.  R left the room still with her mouth wide open so people could see her teeth.
Then we went to the zoo to see the giant tortoises and other reptiles. H acted as official photographer.

Star Tortoise

Python

iguana

rattlesnake

basilisk

giant tortoise foot

painting a tortoise

very colourful tortoise painting

headless peacock

African wild dog

"Hello darlin', fancy a chin wag?"

platypus hunters

pretty seahorses

Port Jackson shark

Fairy penguin

Emerald boa

meerkat

All these beautiful animals + warm sunshine + ice cream = a fabulous day out (despite the murderous moorhens maliciously menacing H)!

Out of the blue.

Wonderful things happen when you least expect it.  The other day I picked up this book from the library for no other reason than it looked like a bit of fun at bedtime.  After reading through the very funny limericks with H the next day I made up my own.  She was amazed that I could do it so easily. Such admiration in her eyes - I felt like a SuperMama!  Tentatively, she had a go at composing her own. The glow of adoration flickered, then died. No more SuperMama :(
Half an hour later and with a little help she had two pages of limericks under her belt. Work is underway to make them into a book.  She is quite excited at the prospect of being a published poet.

Tonight while P was helping the girls with their evening toilette, I started this:

I can crochet! I have been struggling with crochet for some time now, never understanding those confusing instructions.  Tonight something snapped in me. "To Hell with instructions!" I cried, and promptly crocheted.  I don't know what it is.  It may become  a very useful cloth to wash dishes with.

a picture of Sniff - just because she's sweet

...and we're off!

R decided it was time to learn to read, so we signed up with Headsprout once again and luckily R loves it as much as H did.  As expected she wanted to do all the episodes at once so we let her go and sat back to watch. It's wonderful to see her so engaged with the program and the peals of laughter coming from the study just fills me with joy.  After a few days she decided that perhaps just one episode a day would be best as "it's getting a bit hard now".

We had our first Saturday Science session on the weekend. It involved mixing various white powders together and eating them. I'm sure there was alot of important chemistry involved with this experiment and the girls seemed to enjoy it (especially the eating part - the final product was sherbert!).  I didn't take any pictures sadly, as Jan and I were too busy gossiping and eating plum cake.

On Tuesday we began my ambitious Aesop's fable study. R lost interest after reading the fable, and she knew all about gravity already so I didn't really need to teach her anything.  It's true!  I asked her why, if we jumped up high, didn't we float off up in the air? She said, whilst rolling her eyes at me,"Gravity".  I asked her where she thought gravity came from.  "The earth, mummy" followed by a big sigh.
Meanwhile H was rolling about on my bed laughing her head off.  It seems that H has already taught R about gravity.  Hmmm...I don't think they need me at all.

We made tortoises from paper plates..

We did some gravity experiments that I found in a book,  then the girls came up with their own experiment:

I think from now on I'll leave the learning to them. They appear to know what they're doing...