Work in Progress Wednesday

CROCHET

Collars for Choreography team.

CUBE

The rats need some new cage furniture.

CAKE

Boston Favorite Cake from The Fanny Farmer Cookbook.  It involves separating eggs, whipping the whites, then folding them into the batter (action shot above).

Then frosted with the butter frosting we use for the Christmas cookies.  Other decorations and candles still to come.

Science Co-op Week 5

We started off the hour with a review of Newton's first and second law (okay, actually we started off the hour with a discussion of Halloween costumes, and also the comparative advantages of various lightsabers).  I then wrote on the board the third law: For ever action there is an opposite and equal reaction.  The kids copied it onto their papers.

I had thought it would be really cool to have something like an air hockey table so we could boing the pucks around, but transporting the one from our basement wasn't a possibility (my high school physics teacher used an air hockey table under a strobe light to illustrate vectors, and I always remember that as one of the coolest things that happened in high school science).  Annabeth recalled that we had an air hover puck that had its own battery-powered motor that allowed it to "float" on any smooth surface  sort of like this one.  The room we're in for class is carpeted, so we couldn't use it on the floor.  We tried to get a little table top action, but the puck kept flying off the table; the back would pop off and the batteries would fall out.  But the kids had all seen or played air hockey before, so they had an idea off how it worked -- if 2 pucks collided they'd go zipping away in opposite directions.

Next, I had everyone put on safety glasses for our main demonstration.  The safety glasses turned out to be a Huge Deal.  First of all, one of the younger boys had to go get his own pair from his mom (I'd brought enough for everyone, but he wanted his own).  He arrived back in the class while I was explaining that our family owns so many pairs of safety glasses because we're very conscious of eye safety (and one of the girls was disclosing that her father was cutting wood over the weekend WITHOUT safety glasses, and her mom kept telling him to put them on).  The boy explained that his dad was wearing safety glasses RIGHT NOW in the lab he worked in (dad is a PhD chemist); the son was obviously really, really excited to wear glasses like his dad.  And as the class progressed one of the girls kept exclaiming, "I feel like a real scientist!"  Sort of a change of pace from working with the middle schoolers last year.  Although one of the boys in this class wore them on top of his head instead of over his eyes (I tried correcting him.  Later I saw him standing to one side rubbing his eye as though he'd bopped himself and looking like he was starting to cry.  I asked him if he'd hit his eye, and he claimed he was fine, and that he hadn't hit his eye.  I'm pretty sure he had but was afraid he'd get in trouble, or at least get a big ol' "I TOLD you to put the glasses on," and preferred to suffer alone rather than admit he'd been wrong).

Main demonstration:  Put water in a plastic film canister, put part of an Alka Seltzer tablet in water, put lid on, watch lid pop off.  A classic.

We started by just putting the Alka Seltzer in water (I used half tablets) and timing how long it fizzed -- about a minute.  Then I dumped that out, put the same amount of water in, put another half tablet, put the lid on, then started discussing something or the other (it's an enthused bunch full of ideas of other things we should try) and after about 17 seconds POP! the lid went flying off, causing some kids to jump.  One boy asked if we could try it again, but not put the lid on so we could see what happened ... um, isn't that what we did first?

Anyway, forging ahead, we went outside so the the kids could try this on their own (although the room has a high ceiling, it seemed to be wise to move this outside).  A mistake I made:  I should have gone over the procedure multiple times, writing it out on a portable white board or something.  Because once we got outside everyone was sooooo excited that it was a little hard to control who was doing what when.

I put the kids in groups of 2 or 3 (I assigned these basis on Annabeth's advice about who would work well together while actually getting something done).  I had a couple of kids who said they didn't want to actually DO anything, and I told them it was okay, they could just observe their partner.

Round 1:  Fill canister halfway with water, put in half tablet, put on lid, countdown to lid popping off (we didn't have enough watches or clocks for everyone, so I reminded them that Galileo used his pulse and they could simply count steadily).

Round 2: Fill canister 1/4 to 1/3 way with water, put in half tablet, put on lid, countdown to lid popoff.  Does this take longer or shorter?  (I had tried to engage them in predicting which it would be.)

Round 3: Fill canister 2/3 to 3/4 with water, put in half  tablet, put on lid, countdown to lid popoff.  Faster?  Slower?

Bonus round:  Fill canister halfway, put in half tablet, put on lid, put lid-first into plastic tube that's sealed at one end, hold facing some direction other than at me, shoot canister out of tube.

Okay, the above is the THEORY of what we were doing.  In reality, the kids were so excited that they kept coming up with new things they wanted to try ("can we put in a whole tablet?" "No, the reaction would be so fast you can't get it covered and put in the tube before it would blow -- REMEMBER YOU GET ONE VARIABLE, AND THAT'S THE AMOUNT OF WATER -- EVERYTHING ELSE IS A CONTROL!!!").  The Alka Seltzer tablets kept falling apart into tinier pieces, we had water sloshed everywhere, at the lower water levels the lids sometimes didn't blow off (not put on well enough?  slower reaction meant the gas could leak out enough that it didn't need to POP?), kids were filling the plastic tubes with water and throwing canisters and Alka Seltzer in to see what would happen, one boy flipped the canister upside down on the pavement with the plastic tube over it and waited for the entire thing to go flying (okay, actually that was partially my idea) ... the girl who didn't want to participate was plastered on the ground in the field next to the parking lot counting down with her lab partner as they waited for their canister to blow (I think they were pretending to be a bomb squad).  The boy who didn't want to participate was jumping with excitement shouting to his lab partner that it was his turn to put in the tablet and put on the lid ....  You know, I'm not sure they got the point of what was SUPPOSED to happen, but they sure experienced a lot exciting discoveries.  I know that I discovered that several dozen Alka Seltzer in a quart or two of water, over the course of a half hour or so, gets amazingly sticky.  Who knew?

And then I happened to glance at my phone to see the time, since I estimated this would take 15-20 minutes and we could then go play on the playground, and discovered class was OVER.  Oops.  Everyone grabbed something, we zoomed back inside.  Maybe next week we'll try to go over what we learned.  I'm pretty sure it was memorable.

Homeschool Update 9/24/11

- New curriculum rundown:

Ananbeth has started Key to Decimals.  She's starting with book 1 because, hey, why not -- it's easy peasy, and if there happens to be some super-simple concept that she doesn't know (and didn't even realize she didn't know) she'll catch it.  I'm not grading it at this point.  She thinks it's great fun.

She's also started Pandia Press Middle Ages Level 2.  So far she thinks it's more fun and interesting than not.  She enjoyed researching various saints, she zipped through all of A Door in the Wall in a couple of gloomy, rainy days, she hasn't been so thrilled with researching the various monastic orders (although I think that might be because she insists on looking for long, dull articles about them -- if I were in charge I'd look in a children's Catholic resource to find something short and to the point, but she doesn't want to do things that way).  I made a very stripped down timeline for her to use -- drew a vertical line on cardstock, labelled it with a century, punched holes to fit in a 3-ring binder (which will need to be held sideways to view the timeline), and POOF, done.  I was pondering doing something swankier, but she commented, "it's just a history program" with an eyeroll.  You know how you hear about people making superduper timelines that their children can treasure for the rest of their lives?  Not happening here.  So if that's what you're looking for, move along.

In the meantime, Thalia has made a solid start in Jensen's Format Writing, discovering that it isn't really that difficult to crank out some paragraphs once you sit down to do it.  The challenge, of course, is actually beginning the work.

Old curriculum rundown:

- Chapter 6 of Dave Ramsey DONE.  We're halfway through the course.
- I actually helped on a physics problem, although I'm a bit fuzzy on why my solution worked.  Overall, the course involves many phone calls back and forth amongst the students.
- No clue on what's happening with Notgrass History, Writeshop, or Shepherd's Life Science.  These are all co-op classes, so mostly this week  I just asked if the homework's done.
- Also, theater, and technical theater I don't have much to do with other than find out what happened each week so I can jot them down to form a course description (well, what happened other than XYZ and ABC got in trouble with the teacher, since it's fairly apparent that I'll be hearing that pretty much every single week about those same two adolescent boys).
- Much cooking and discussion of cooking now that the weather's cooler.  Should we have a half-credit cooking class?
- Thalia is driving more and more places.  Which isn't a class, but it's a learning experience.
- She'd really like a Spanish class, but we've ruled out Rosetta Stone and Visual Link.  Not ready for dual enrollment yet.  What other choices exist?

More Weekly Reports at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers, a veritable font of homeschool ramblings.

A Snapshot of the Reading Life

Recently completed:

Heads You Lose by Lisa Lutz and David Hayward. I like Lisa Lutz's Spellman Files series, so I thought this would be appealing. Woops, wrong. It was contrived and annoying. I finished it out of a (probably misguided) desire for completion more than out of a desire to see what happened to any of the characters. Because, in the end, I didn't care -- not about the characters, not about the authors. Sorry, not much more I can say.

Star Wars Fate of the Jedi: Ascencion Book 8 of a 9 book series written on a rotating basis by 3 authors. If you ever wondered what Star Wars would be like if it had been written as a bodice ripper, this is the book for you. And, just like a bodice ripper, you can skip through it without losing track of the plot because there's just not a lot of plot there. Really. About 50-100 pages from the end I gave up, skipped to the last chapter or so, wrapped up the parts of the story that probably matter for the next book (oh, okay, Abeloth does THAT -- no big surprise there; the Sith do THIS -- again, no surprise; and Vestra is up to THAT -- huh, coulda written that myself; and Luke and the Jedi are pretty much up to the same ol' same old), and returned it to the library. But I shall persevere through to the final book because, yoohoo, STAR WARS!

Currently reading:

How to Become a Straight-A Student by Cal Newport. I think I've been reading this forever, although it's only been about 4-6 weeks. Really, it's a decent guide on how to organize your study time for maximum effect. It would be great for a college student to read, preferably before the beginning of the semester. It would probably be helpful for high school students. But, like I say, I'm not sure what's in it for me, other than being able to recommend it to people the appropriate age and occupation -- which I can already do, therefor no need for me to finish the book. Maybe I just like it because whilst reading I can fantasize about having been that clued in during college.

How to Be a High School Superstar by Cal Newport. Takes some of the same concepts from the college book (above) and applies them to high school so that kids have plenty of free time to develop "interestingness". Also purportedly claims to explain how to develop "interestingness". I'm only about a third of the way through, and this one is worth finishing to see where he's going with it. Homeschool theoretically could be the PERFECT for giving kids huge blocks of time to develop "interestingness", but plenty of homeschool kids aren't making the leap. C'mon, you've all heard the stories of homeschoolers who, given free rein over their time, fritter it away on various meaningless pursuits and are barely literate years later. I suspect Cal Newport doesn't have magical words of inspiration for those kids -- I suspect the inspiration to be a Superstar has to already be present, and Newport simply gives a way to channel it. But, hey, it looks like it will be an interesting read. And I'm attracted to the way the author challenges the status quo, stating that the typical way people try to make college applications stand out is really downright silly. But, will my love of all things status-quo-challenging blind me to the flaws in his premise? Hmm....

For the Love of Physics by Walter Lewin. I picked this up at random from the New Book shelves at the library, attracted to the cover picture of a guy swinging on a pendulum in a classroom. I often like science biographies (Lives of a Cell, for example). And the fact that I'm currently teaching physics to a bunch of grade-school-age kids adds to the attraction. Wow, this book is great for inspiration. Admittedly I can't show the exact same demos in my itty-bitty co-op class -- I don't have access to the swanky equipment to drag into the classroom -- but his enthusiasm for his subject is infectious. I wish, though, that the book had an appendix that listed out all the YouTube videos and cool websites he mentions in the text, since as it stands now I have all sort of crappy little bits of paper stuck in pages since I'm often reading the without an internet-connected computer by my side. Really, if you like reading about science topics, this is a book you don't want to miss.

Okay, there are probably more bookmark-ridden books languishing around here. But these are the ones I've been carrying around with me lately, and continue to carry around.

Wordless Wednesday

Co-op Science Week 4

I was operating in a state of exhaustion this week, and didn't even write out a lesson plan. Fortunately Newton's second law is pretty straightforward, so it was pretty easy to wing it.

 I started by defining force, mass, and acceleration, writing each word on the board and then discussing. For "force" I pushed on various things (the wall, one of the kids, etc.). Easy and obvious. For "mass" I explained that it was little more complicated, but it has to do with how big and heavy something is BUT it isn't exactly that -- it's more along the lines of how much STUFF (matter) something has. I had a styrofoam cooler and a black ice pack -- the black ice pack was smaller in dimension, but weighed more while we're standing here on Earth. I chose those objects, by the way, because they I saw them in my house while I was pondering how to explain the concept. For "acceleration" I talked about the accelerator on a car and the acceleration lane on a highway. I also explained that scientists have much more precise definitions of these things that take direction into consideration, but we weren't going to worry about that now since we're just after a broad picture.

Next, some hands-on examples of the concept of Newton's 2nd law. We talked about how easy it was for H to zip that Barbie car across the floor in last week's class, and tried to picture how tough it would be for her to push MY car across the parking lot. That's an example of a greater mass needing more force to move it and attain the same acceleration. Then I whipped out a slingshot and pulled it back just a little to send a pingpong ball going a short distance; next pulled it back more so the pingpong ball bounced off the opposite wall and halfway back across the room (this was wildly popular) for another example of varying force, but this time holding mass constant so acceleration became greater. Finally, to demonstrate 2 different masses reacting to gravity, we did the ever-popular impact-crater demonstration, which oddly enough not one of the kids said they'd ever seen -- I put flour in a cake pan, covered it with a layer of cocoa, set the entire thing on a drop cloth on the flour, then dropped a pingpong ball and a golf ball in it at the same time. I explained to the kids that I hadn't tried it at home, but my hypothesis was that the golf ball would hit harder and make a bigger crater (again, this was wildly popular in that I admitted that I hadn't tried it out ahead of time -- plus the way the flour poofed all over our shoes -- I let one of the kids try it a second time, then fielded about a zillion questions about whether we could bake a cake in class sometime).

Next, I wrote out a simplified version of the law on the board and had them copy it onto a piece of paper for their booklet of Newton's Laws: The acceleration of an object depends upon its mass and the applied force. The kids who were stunned and horrified by the copying-off-the-board concept last week seemed less so this week.

After everyone had finished copying, I erased the board and wrote F=MA, which I explained, emphasizing that it was an incredibly important math equation, and that their parents would probably recognize it if they went home tonight and said they had studied it today.

Some of the kids were asking if they were going to draw something on their papers again this week (last week I had them draw or write about one of the demonstrations we did). I said they could use the space to design their next project it they wanted. Because we were going to apply our knowledge of force, mass and acceleration to CATAPULTS. I used AmiMental's blog post for my inspiration, although I tweaked it a bit (homeschoolers tweak everything, it seems), using slightly different supplies.

Really, I should've added "measuring tape" to the list of supplies -- as kids finished their catapults they lined up and shot them off. We laid popsicle sticks on the floor to show where the various cotton balls hit.

I pretty much joined them in the building this time, helping kids who were drawing a blank on how to go about this to brainstorm ("hey, how about if we do THIS", or "do you think it would help if you added something here?"). Some of the boys built slingshots, claiming that they were a type of catapult. Um, not really. But I also said we'd probably be doing more with catapults later on when we get to machines, so I just sort of rolled my eyes and moved on.

Many of the kids handed in their creations at the end of the class period. I wrote their names on them, and plan to save them for our Open House display later in the fall.

Weekend Report

Most of the weekend was spent messing with the bathroom. A couple of friends came over to help pull out the old vanity and sink top, and carry them to the garage. Then they decided to start pulling up the peel-and-stick floor, only to discover that it had been stuck on to luan that had been screwed into the floor and then painted grey. The paint made it almost impossible to find the screws. So that was quite an adventure to get up off the floor. So many floors in this house have been just plain weird.

Of course, this involved taking the toilet out AGAIN. We took it out last week to get the wallpaper remnants from behind it, and paint the wall blue.

ANYWAY, Annabeth and I spent Saturday night assembling the faucet and putting it on the sink. Then we set the sink top onto the new vanity.


Here's a plumbing tip -- have the smallest person in the family do the under-the-sink work. Here's an action shot of Annabeth installing the little doohickey that makes the drain stop go up and down:



Also, the sink doesn't have shut off valves (what's up with that?), so we had to keep turning off the water in the house. Rick wanted to install valves when we put it in the new sink, but, alas, Lowes doesn't stock the correct size for our pipes.

There was also much laying of backer board in preparation for tiling the floor.

In the meantime, Thalia went camping with her Girl Scout troop. It was an all-weekend campout, but I picked her up on Saturday so she could go to ballet.

This was her first ballet class at this place with this teacher. Wow, really big class, which is Beginning Ballet for Teens. The teacher seems really excellent -- they had a two-way mirror, so I sat out in the hallway and watched. Thalia's foot strength has diminished over the summer, but overall she "got" a lot of the stuff right away because so much of it's similar to Irish Dance.

Then a visit from my brother and sister-in-law, who had come to town to see the zoo, Botanical Garden, and Butterfly House. They stopped by to say howdy. They declined the offer to have supper together, saying they'd eaten so much in the last couple of days (Amighetti's, Joey B's, Charlie Gitto's, and some pancake place) (Oh, total digression -- when they said they were going to the zoo and the Botanical Garden I told them they should go out to eat on the Hill, and suggested Amighetti's for a sandwich, plus go somewhere for toasted ravioli. "Rick says if he only has 24 left to live he's going to have a sandwich from Amighetti's" -- bear in mind Rick is gluten-free and doesn't eat most of the stuff they put in the sandwich. So, we were talking about where all they'd been to eat, and Rick was saying that toasted ravioli is also on the 24-hour list, and the pancakes sounded pretty good so he'd consider adding them to the list also, and we started calling it the "Rick Death Tour of Restaurants".) So they went back to Forest Park to see the hot air balloons, and we continued doing bathroom rehab.

Sunday was church, followed by a meeting for the mission trip to the Dominican Republic that Thalia will be taking over Spring Break. They started meetings about this in August. Yesterday was about all the notarized paperwork, including things like what to do with her body if she drops dead in a foreign country -- yeah, you have to sign off on that. Things left to do: get a passport (someone advised us to simply wait until she was 16 to get the 10 year renewable version), find out her blood type which we can find no record of but it's not a big deal because we need to go to the doctor anyway for things like typhoid and malaria vaxes, get some sort of compressible packing system so she can haul along all of her own bedding, come up with about $1000 more to pay for airfare and lodging to add to the $500 we've already paid. Also, the kids who have been before were giving the scoop to the kids who are new to the experience -- the odd stuff like "take those powdered drink mix-ins, because the purified water starts tasting weird after a while", "really, you'll only want to wear sports bras", "the first year [XYZ] only took one pair of underwear for the entire week, so the 2nd year we threatened to all take underwear for him in our own luggage unless he packed more". In other words, those things adults don't think to put in the handouts.

Then home and back to church for choirs.

Hmm, when I write it out here it doesn't sound like so much. But really, it was exhausting, especially the bathroom stuff. And after messing with the pipes so much I'm so grateful every time I turn on a faucet and water comes out -- indoor plumbing is a wonderful thing.