Taking a Break

The blog is on a short break as we adjust to life with a new baby. Alivia Elise was born September 5th,and we're busy adjusting to a new routine.

Science Experiment - Can an Egg Bounce?

Although we are using Beyond Little Hearts for His Glory by Heart of Dakota as our main curriculum, I tweak and add on quite a bit. Fridays are our science experiment days, and we are using the book: 101 Cool Science Experiments.

The very first experiment involved seeing if we could bounce a raw egg. The experiment was very simple. All you have to do is soak one raw egg in a glass of water and one raw egg in a glass of white vinegar. The book said to leave it for 7 days and observe how it changes over the week. After 7 days, see if you can bounce it without it breaking.

Here is a pic of the 1st egg soaking in vinegar. The shell will bubble and slowly start to turn into a soft skin rather than a calcified shell.

We ended up having to do this twice because 7 days ended up being too long. One gentle throw and the egg exploded and stunk up the whole back yard. So we tried again, this time leaving the egg in the vinegar for 4 days. We had much better results. She was able to gently bounce it 5-6 times before it broke.

Here is a pic of the egg after 7 days in the vinegar. As you can see, it's virtually see through and thin. It did not bounce.

Here is a link to a video of her bouncing the 2nd egg, which was neither as soft or translucent as the 1st egg. She was a little nervous that we'd have another failure, so she starts off a little slowly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFW8ChFXSQU

After we conducted the experiment, she completed her science experiment notebooking sheet that I printed from somewhere online. I spent one whole night printing out different notebooking pages, and for the life of me can't remember where I located this one. I like this one because it's simple and has a place for illustrating the experiment. We are gearing up to grow some crystals soon, but that's going to take a couple of weeks from start to finish. Happy homeschooling!

Color Wheel and Color Theory Art Project

Today was our 2nd day of 2nd grade, and Tuesday is art day. Last year we did a lot of fun craft projects, but this year I'm focusing more on art theories and techniques rather than just crafting. We're learning about color theory for the first month, and I wanted to share this week's art lesson.

The first thing I did was print out a simple primary and secondary color wheel from Donna Young.org My plan was to have her color in the circles, but she said she didn't need to do that. I explained the primary color wheel first and put a big P in the center. Then we went over the secondary color wheel, and I put a big S in the center of that one. We talked about which colors, when mixed together, create another completely different color.

The second part was to create color wheel flowers using the art lesson provided over at Deep Space Sparkle. I LOVE this website and am using it almost exclusively for our lessons this year. We followed the directions provided to create our flower bases and petals. During our painting, we reviewed which primary colors created the secondary colors we needed for the petals. Once it dried, she cut and pasted her flowers together and drew some stems. Upon completion, I asked her to name the primary colors that you mix together to create the secondary colors, without looking at the color wheel as a reference. Then we went on the website and looked at the samples that other children have done. I didn't show her beforehand because I didn't want her to try to copy how the other kids did their flowers, since she's a bit of a perfectionist.

She really enjoyed this project, and I like that it covered color wheel and color theory for kids, cutting, pasting, and tracing. Happy homeschooling!