Volcanoes - Saturday Science

Hi there - this is P again after a Saturday Science session on volcanoes.  We've always wanted to make a volcano and it seemed like a great way to get back into some Saturday Science after getting out of the routine for a few weeks.  We started by thinking about what's inside the Earth.  It's very hot in there, so hot that rock melts and is called "magma".  When magma breaks through the surface we call it "lava".  All that separates us from the magma below is a crust of cooled, solid rock.  How thick is the crust?  H, R and K made their guesses on the picture above.  It turns out, if the Earth were an apple, the crust would be about half the thickness of the apple skin!  This is still tens of kilometres thick, but you get the idea.

The crust is broken into tectonic plates which float on the magma below.  Where plates push into each other mountains form (like the Himalayas).  A fun way to model this is with pancakes floating on maple syrup!

The pushing and rubbing also creates heat and releases trapped gas and this is why volcanoes often form where plates meet.  Time to go outside and build some volcanoes!

Take a jar, surround it with soil, add some warm water, sodium bicarbonate, detergent and food dye.  Then pour in vinegar and watch the eruption!

Vinegar reacts with the sodium bicarbonate to release carbon dioxide gas.  This bubbles up in the detergent and causes a magnificent eruption.  Heat causes carbon dioxide to be released also, which is what happens when you cook with self raising flour, and also when carbonate rocks are heated.  Our homemade volcanoes erupted many times until at last our supplies ran out.  It was a lot of fun.  We finished with a great National Geographic video of real volcanoes in action.

August

This post is so long overdue I can't quite remember all the hilariously funny and deeply interesting events and conversations that must certainly have happened.  I could make some up I suppose but at the moment I'm sitting in a crowded corridor at Box Hill TAFE. There are so many other ballet mums chatting and laughing and rogue ballerinas running riot all over the place that I can hardly hear myself think. The conversation next to me is extremely distracting but as I don't know these women I'd better keep on typing and pretend I'm not listening.  

So here's a list of the worky type things the students at the Brian St Centre have been up to.
The most exciting new experience for the Snork Maiden is her debut into adult society as a volunteer at the Eltham Toy Library.  She was very keen to start working in a library shelving books, but all our local libraries were most unhelpful and couldn't offer her any kind of work experience as she is "too young".  So after perusing the Volunteering Victoria website we found the Eltham Toy Library was in need of a couple of volunteers.  After emails, phone calls and a rather stressful interview with the lovely lady in charge the Snork Maiden began her new career and is now, two months later, practically running the place.  Well, ok that is a slight exaggeration but she is doing very well and her boss told me that she's working so much more reliably and competently than many of her adult helpers!
Her duties include:

• receiving returned toys -  checking for damage, counting parts, ticking items off the receipts

• setting up and putting away toys

• returning toys to shelves

• tidying shelves

• using the computer to borrow new items and print out receipts

Moomintroll also enjoys coming along to the toy library sessions because of all the very cute toddlers that come in. She's made friends with some of them and will happily keep them occupied while their mothers browse the shelves for new toys to borrow.  While the girls go about their duties,  I spend a lovely hour sitting in the adjoining Eltham library engrossed in the land of Westeros and the saga that is The Game of Thrones.  From time to time Moomintroll wanders in and does some maths, and we always visit the Teapot cafe in the same building for lunch afterwards, so it's a very productive and tasty morning for all of us.

  *It's getting harder to concentrate here. The conversation next to me has suddenly decreased in volume and they are talking in low, very serious tones. No matter how hard I try I can't make out much beyond "...thirteen years of school..." ,  " ...the teachers can't...."  , "...a lot of parents are complaining...",  "....get serious now because you have another 6 years of school ahead of you...".  
It's intriguing but I've heard all this so many times before from nearly all of the school mums I know. Perhaps I should step in and quietly offer them an alternative.  It's times like these I need some  "Home Education? Ask me how!" brochures to casually strew about the place or drop in their path. 

Back to the important stuff now. Stop eavesdropping T!

Just Brass practices are going great guns. At the end of term all the kids put on a concert and we heard some beautiful and not so beautiful renditions of Rain Rain, Good King Wenceslas, Indigo Rock and Campdown Races over and over and over and over again.  Besides the massed band pieces there were 51 solos and duets, one of them by Moomintroll and her friend Hayley which was a huge surprise for us all. It was awesome by the way.

Other learnin' done included starting our own newspaper called The Daily Brain with chief reporters Paul Robinsons, Jane Brain and Marge Areen.  You can read some of the fascinating reports on Paul and Jane's blogs here and here. 
Those two intrepid reporters have also filmed an interview with their tennis coach J.





The Snork Maiden is blitzing through the Life of Fred books. She's now on the third to last book. The moomin child is working her way slowly though her maths books and has just completed her first one, making her a 'Maths Wizard' apparently. She has a certificate to prove it. She even wrote her own name on it.

Well, that's pretty much it for August.    So far September is proving to be a productive month but more on that in my next post. 
I think the ballet class is wrapping up now, so I shall do the same.

Coming up in the next post: Jane Brain and Paul Robinsons's must see interview and rare footage of Moomintroll's debut duet!