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. 

Slime!

Yep, we made slime. It was fun. You mix some Borax in with water. I think I used four cups water to one fourth cup Borax. You slowly pour that, little bit at a time, into a mixture of equal parts school glue and water mixed together. We had more of the Borax solution than we needed. I used clear glue and dyed it green.

At first our slime was pretty stringy.

As we added more of the Borax solution, it clumped together more.

We picked green as a classic slime color but it really did look revolting.

It ended up being stiffer than I thought it would. Perhaps I added too much of the Borax mixture. But it's still fun for them to play with. Since we made it with two entire 5 oz. bottles of glue, we have quite a bit of it. Genevieve here is holding only her half of the slime supply. 

Find-it game

I've been wanting to make one of these for a while because it just seemed fun. I found a water bottle I really liked so I used it for this.

I used rice but I could have used sand or salt or anything else really. I dyed it blue with food coloring and rubbing alcohol. I used rubbing alcohol because it evaporates quickly. I used a little too much at first and was choking on the fumes. 

The funnest part was gathering stuff to put in the bottle. We had a large collection of beads that had several alphabets in them so I gathered up a mismatched alphabet to put in there along with a bunch of other little odds and ends from a tiny screw to a pink benadryl pill

I glued the lid on and printed out the list and taped it on the side. I wish I had filled it a little more full. But they've had fun with it so far and are already asking for another one with more stuff in it! Um yeah, I'll just whip that up real quick... 

Ooblek

Everyone needs to make ooblek at some point in time. It behaves very strangely. If you play with it slowly, it behaves like a liquid and if you play with it quickly, it behaves like a solid. So you can't punch your fist into it, but you can dip your fingers into it. You can pick up a handful of it only to have it melt between your fingers.

Add water to the corn starch. You need more corn starch than water but we tweaked it a little because we weren't sure about the consistency. In the end, the water evaporates and your mixture gets thicker over time. 

It was difficult to stir. We added blue food coloring.

We played with it on and off all afternoon and it ended up making a huge corn starchy mess in my kitchen but it was worth it. It was really weird stuff.