Various things

A pop up ziggurat book

We decided to catch a spider and put it in a jar with twigs and observe it building a web. We planned to catch bugs for it to eat. Unfortunately, it died only a couple hours after we caught it. 

I burn light bulb candles when we need good ideas. Just kidding. Elaine's mother made this and it's pretty awesome. 

It makes people happy!

First Week of School

We've started school this week and we're off to a great start. We are studying ancient history this year which is something both girl love.

Hmmm...

Ok so maybe hair doesn't exactly get brushed before we start. 

Reading about Gilgamesh.

We drew in our nature journals this week. Imogen found these wings on the back porch.

Making a clay tablet.

And making up our own pictograph language. 

Herb garden!

I am gardening this year. This isn't something that comes naturally to me, and I've already had a few missteps, but Jeremy confessed that the limited success I've seen so far is well beyond his dismal expectations. True, I waited so long to harvest my heads of lettuce that they sat on the ground and rotted. And my peppers seem to be hiding timidly under the tomatoes. But my broccoli is doing beautifully and my tomato plants are shooting up. And yesterday I planted the herb garden above! It smells just amazing and I'm looking forward to finding all kinds of uses for my herbs. I have a mix of things I use all the time (cilantro), things I usually use dry but will love to use fresh (basil and oregano) and things I don't really use but will expand my herbal horizons. Besides, peppermint smells so yummy, who can resist?

Spring is in the air!

Which makes it a little hard to breath.

The world is full of seeds and tiny flowers and things making a mess all over the place right now. 

We headed outside to draw things in our nature journals. The grass was wet so we sat on the trampoline.

We used clear contact paper to save some of the things we drew. We have done this since we first started our nature books and the first leaves we put in over a year ago still look nice. 

I'm not very good at nature stuff, being a very indoorsy person, so we don't really identify things so much as simply observe and enjoy them. 

We drew with wild and crazy colors instead of accurate colors. 

Genevieve's book,

Imogen's book.

We have a tree that drops tons of these seeds each year. They spin wildly as they fall to the ground and my kids have always called them helicopters. 

Rainforest model

As part of our habitat study, Imogen and Genevieve created this rain forest model inside a box.

Originally we were going to do animals and plants from rain forests all over the world, which is where the bamboo came from, but in the end, all the animals ended up being from the Amazon. 

Our Anaconda. 

A sloth (on the left) and a howler monkey (on the right). 

An anteater in the foreground and a giant armadillo behind him.  

The harpy eagle is Imogen's newly found "favorite bird". 

The jaguar lurks in the background.

They are already planning out what their desert model will look like. 

When Chemistry Goes Wrong

We've been having a lot of fun mixing things up lately. But this did not go well. I followed these instructions to make a polymer bouncing ball. I followed the instructions very carefully. But hey, maybe I did something wrong. Because that picture didn't even remotely resemble what we got. 

The website said if we used clear glue, we would get translucent balls. But the corn starch made them opaque.

They were sticky and weird feeling but eventually the stickiness went away as we kneaded it. But it never had the smooth surface of a regular bouncy ball. But it did bounce. 

This was the general reaction to the weird balls.

Our complete failure to make Gak was more amusing and was also caused by my misreading the directions. We will try this one again. 

Density

I got this idea here. But I didn't do as many layers. 

We started with honey for our bottom layer. 

Dish soap. 

Vegetable oil

We forgot that water was more dense than oil, so when we poured the water (dyed green) it of course when right through the oil. We dyed the rubbing alcohol orange and put that layer on top. Even tipping the bottle and swirling it around gently did not mix the liquids. 

Testing which evaporates faster. Water (green) or rubbing alcohol (yellow). 

Fake Spring

Our yard is covered with these flowers every spring. We've had enough strangely warm days that they are popping up early this year. 

I find them everywhere, from my children's hair to tucked into the door handles on my car. 

Paint is a regular part of our day

We are doing a habitat study now and through this next week at least. This is a subject our library has lots of resources on and I was able to request stacks of books from them. 

"What? Can't you see I'm busy, Mom?"

Believe it or not, my table does get cleared off on a regular basis. But it takes no time at all before you can't see it buried under all our school stuff again. 

Pet chickens

We went to a friend's house to hang out and they had chickens who were very friendly.

American Government study

We have just about finished up our American Government unit study. 

We talked about how our government came to be formed and why. 

We talked about the structure of our government and what the purpose of each branch is. 

How a bill becomes a law. 

And of course our Constitution. 

We still have a book to read about how elections work but otherwise, we're finished!

Tadpole update: They are all still alive and the water in the tank is clear again. I guess whatever was fogging it up settled down.

Government

We are doing an American Government study this week. I found a copy of the Preamble to the Constitution online (forgot where) with each word in a different box. I printed it out, had the girls memorize it, then chopped it up and had them glue it down by memory. 

Tadpoles

We managed to order tadpoles in the middle of January and they all arrived alive. I got them from homesciencetools.com. I've ordered things from them before and always been happy. I had to specify which day they would deliver but I forgot that our mail always comes very late in the day. We were gone to ballet when they arrived but it was one of our strangly warmer days and they were all fine. 

We were instructed to set up their tank ahead of time with spring water, which I did. I had a fish tank from my inlaws that used to house their fish. I cleaned out the tank and rinsed the gravel as thoroughly as I could, but my water turned foggy shortly after. Since the water was all bought from the store, I imagine it has to have been the tank that was dirty.

I was kind of stressed about it but hey, if they were tadpoles in the wild they would be swimming in a slimy lake... so maybe they'll be ok. It was really too late to do anything about it by the time the water turned foggy. It's been a day and they're swimming around and looking lively. There are seven of them and they'll take about a year to grow to full size.