Term 2 - Weeks 1 to 3

The past weeks have flown by so quickly that I've forgotten a lot of what Moomintroll and I have been up to. Thank goodness for the camera!
After our wonderful holiday in Indonesia it took us a while to get back to work. In fact it took us a whole week! But we're back on track now and after looking at the photos I am happy to see that we've actually done quite a bit.
Here's a summary:

Moomintroll's current passion is drawing and this is her new toy - Opa's old drawing board from his workdays.  She loves drawing on it and we've begun learning about technical drawing and design. I just wish we could fit in inside the house! Many hours are also spent on Minecraft and SketchUp creating buildings and homes.

Her first attempt at perspective drawing came out quite well. We followed a tutorial on this blog.
We also finally finished our Art in a Box. The items for this creation were collected on one of our geography walks last term. We painted them and the box with white paint, arranged them, then glued them onto the box.

Kitchen Chemistry 1.  Using vinegar and bicarbonate of soda we did the Dancing Raisins and Grapes experiment, then blew up balloons with varying amounts of vinegar and bicarb. We also did the Mentos in a Coke bottle experiment, much to the delight of Sniff who happily licked up the mess.

Kitchen Chemistry 2 - making a rubbery egg by soaking an egg in vinegar overnight.

Kitchen Chemistry 3 - Changing States of Matter.  Using resources such as Backyard Science, Study Jams, The Magic Schoolbus and Education.com  we investigated how matter changes. Here we watched ice melting - one cube covered in salt (below right), the other just left alone (our control).  Moomintroll was blown away to see the salted ice melting almost twice as fast as the control cube.

More chemistry. The best kind - the edible kind!  Making molecules with gum drops. Other edible experiments included baking bread and several chocolate cakes and brownies. All in the name of research of course!

Kinetic sand is getting a good workout this week. We finally took the plunge and mixed up the colours but not before making a few colourful mountains.  Kinetic sand is great fun and so versatile - art and maths in one session!

ANZAC Day was last week - we headed into the city to Fed Square to see the thousands of poppies on display to commemorate 100 years since the Gallipoli Landing, and in the Follow the Flag exhibition at the Ian Potter Centre we added a poppy each to remember the girls' Great Great Grandfather.

Moomintroll is reading a Nancy Drew mystery, Danny the Champion of the World, and Awful Auntie this week. I am reading another wonderful book by Barbara Kingsolver called Flight Behaviour.  I can't get enough of her books!