Kitchen Science: Density Cake

You'll excuse me, I hope, if this reads as a bit scattered today, but I bolted awake before dawn this morning to a phone call telling me that the big kid's chicks were at the post office waiting for us!

The kids and I took a field trip to the fire station a few months ago, and during that trip a firefighter lectured us on the importance of middle-of-the-night fire drills, because when people are awakened from a sound sleep, they awake confused.

Friends, I awoke confused.

I tossed the room looking for my pants, gave up (I found them a bit ago, tangled in the sheets), couldn't find new pants, found pants, forgot where I put my phone down, spent ages looking for it, found it, woke the kids, remembered that the brooder wasn't completely set up, had a right panic about it, couldn't get the heat lamp at exactly the perfect height to emit exactly the perfect temperature and was completely unable to troubleshoot this, tried many things, gave up and went to lie down for a few minutes, remembered the ladder and dragged it in from the garage to serve as a heat lamp stand, couldn't find the address of the post office, set the phone down and lost it again, etc.

Fortunately, by the time the kids had found a height that worked for the heat lamp and got the brooder temperature approximately correct, the fog of sleep had somewhat lifted from my brain (the coffee that I drank as the kids worked was crucial to this process), and I only had to go to the wrong building, call the post office and get directions to the right building, and then go in the wrong doors of the right building once before I successfully located our chicks.

They're safely home now, drinking and eating and bopping around their brooder, and I've declared today a Chick Holiday, because who can be expected to do math and spelling and history when there are FIFTEEN CHICKS BEING CUTE?!?

Therefore, the science project that I'm going to tell you about actually occurred earlier this week. I'd told you that we were finished exploring density for a bit after the Great Density Experiment, but then I realized that the kids had really only explored the density of liquids, so I thought that I'd set up just one last little project so that they could note to themselves that density also applies to solids.

The goal of this experiment is to determine which cake toppings are less dense than cake, and which are more dense. Instead of measuring mass and volume to determine this, the kids let the substances themselves illustrate their density, by placing all toppings on top of the cake, baking it, and then examining it to determine which toppings fall to the bottom of the cake and which toppings stay up top.

To do this experiment, you will need:

• cake mix. The kids are capable of making cake from scratch, but that's another project in itself, with different variables (Did the kid put in enough baking powder and soda? Did the kid put in the correct amount of flour?), so to make sure that the cake itself would be a neutral substance, I let the kids pick out a boxed cake mix.
• toppings. Guide the kids just enough to make sure that they're choosing substances that will float and substances that will sink.
• paper to record the experiment. Lab notebooks would be ideal, but I'm still working the kids up to those.

1. Have the kids prepare the cake mix and put it in the baking pan.
2. Lay out all possible toppings. The kids used frozen tart cherries, candy-melt wafers, caramels, chocolate chips, almond slivers, pecan pieces, M&Ms, and dehydrated marshmallows.
3. Have the kids grid out the cake on a piece of paper, and as they place the ingredients, they should record each location on their grid, along with their hypothesis of the substance's behavior during baking. The grid will look like this:

Pop the cake in the oven and bake it according to package directions. When it's finished, you can evaluate your hypotheses based on observation--

--and core samples:

I was pleased that the kids hadn't correctly predicted the behavior of every single substance, because surprises are fun. And the little kids who came over to play "mud kitchen" with my own little kid that afternoon quite enjoyed helping us eat our density cake!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, homeschool projects, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

My Latest: Light Bulbs and Origami

a write-up of the Fold the Flock origami project

including just a little of the antics of these ridiculous chickens. Here's what else happened backstage:

the chickens approach

they investigate

they give me a look that I cannot interpret 

they destroy!!!

destroy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!!!!!!

Who knew that the domestic chicken is the mortal enemy of the passenger pigeon?

a round-up of other easy origami projects

and a tutorial for hollowing out an incandescent light bulb

I have been doing this a TON since we moved here, and setting the bulbs aside, because I know that at some point (very soon, actually--incandescent light bulbs do NOT last long!), we'll have finished replacing all the bulbs in the house with LEDs, and then I may never see an incandescent light bulb again.

The children have been enjoying these bulbs, as well. We actually have a light bulb Christmas ornament craft that will be posting on Crafting a Green World tomorrow; the kids had to get an early start on their Christmas crafting, since they were creating an ornament for the Indiana Statehouse Christmas tree. Just between you and me, the ornaments that they made will probably be hung in the back of the tree, against the wall, but it matters not, because they had a fabulous time, and they crafted an extra ornament of the same type for our own tree.

...yay...

Autumn Play

Autumn here in Indiana has been gorgeous this year, and everyone has been outside enjoying it!

And thank goodness, too, because I'm already dreading winter.

Shiver.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Eco-Friendly Easter

True story: I thought that Easter was this Sunday. A company actually wanted to host a giveaway over at Crafting a Green World this week, and I deterred their rep because the timing would be too tight. Because I thought Easter was this Sunday.

Even more embarrassing: it took a trip to Wal-mart (where I desperately needed to buy the kids chocolate rabbits for their Easter baskets, since I thought Easter was this Sunday) to teach me the actual date of Easter this year, because they had signs up everywhere. Yep, classy all around, I am.

Anyway, now you at least have plenty of time to check out my roundup of tons of eco-friendly Easter egg tutorials (my favorite are the wooden, felted wool, and papier mache eggs)--

--and my review of Natural Earth Paint's natural egg dye kit, which we LOVED:

Yes, her hands are filthy, but that thumbnail is an injury entitled Willow vs. 20lb Rock.

I actually really like Easter crafting, so I'm excited that we've got a few more weeks to do it! I *think* we're going to decoupage tissue paper onto wooden eggs today, but right now the kids are downstairs building three swords out of PVC pipes, and then they're probably going to want to get started on the catapults, so the sweet little afternoon of decoupaging Easter eggs and listening to the Easter Parade soundtrack may not happen.

Siege warfare and hand-to-hand combat, however? That's looking like a given!

Work Plans for the Week of March 3: Latin and Libraries

I'm pretty well over the way that the Box widget that embeds my work plans always insists on scrolling immediately to them when my blog loads, and the way that Box has completely ignored my question about this, so at some point I'm going to have to make the time to research other document embedding systems, sigh. Until then, however...

MONDAY: While the local schoolchildren are suffering through yet another snow day here, it's business as usual for us--it looks like even our local volunteer gig will be open today, so add "De-ice the car" to my to-do list! Syd's working on her factor chart (I got the idea from an old elementary Montessori manual--I'll tell you about it another time, if it turns out well) right now, while Will, who's finished part of her reading work, is heating up some French bread for our breakfast.

We've got chapter 19 of Song School Latin today (more body parts), instrument lessons--and I am REALLY going to have to kick their butts on these, because it's been a while since they've really focused on regular practice--and we'll be able to spend a few weeks doing some regular creative writing, since our local PBS station finally got their butts in gear about the PBS Kids Writers Contest.

TUESDAY: The kids have both Math Mammoth and First Language Lessons today, which I always appreciate during lesson planning since they're so blessedly easy to schedule. A playdate and baking a king cake to celebrate Mardi Gras will use up most of the rest of the day, but we'll also be working on the kids' Girl Scout service project. They need to provide a bookshelf as part of this project, and at first I thought that we might get it donated, but the dimensions required are pretty specific to fit into a limited space, AND Will has expressed so much interest in woodworking lately, that I've finally decided that we'll just make the bookshelf. It's still a little cold for woodwork outdoors, so we may find ourselves with lumber, the portable work bench, and the circular saw in the living room, but I think it's going to be a great beginning woodworking project for the kids, and one that they're guaranteed to see in use every week at our regular volunteer gig.

WEDNESDAY: Will's big Spring Ice Show performance is this night--wish her luck!

THURSDAY: We've still got a couple of chemistry experiments centered on acids and bases to perform, but I didn't get around to getting all the materials for those yet, so I'm moving us on to the paleontology that we'll be studying off and on as we lead up to our dinosaur dig this summer. I imagine that we'll be interspersing this paleontology study with seasonal studies, like botany and animal biology, and kid-led interests, but for now, I'll be grounding the kids' understanding, and sneaking in a little more Latin!

I think the kids are also ready to start interspersing Drawing With Children lessons with other types of hands-on art, so we'll be trying out this copy of The Color Book that I was sent to review (ooh, I just saw that it hasn't been officially released yet--how fun to have it in our paint-covered little hands!)--it's focused on exploring color through a variety of activities, so it should be a fun integration into our week.

FRIDAY: We're soundly into our Indiana study, but I wasn't quite prepared to move into the next chapter of The Story of the World (nor am I quite sure, yet, how I'm going to handle that chapter, since it highlights one of the book's few flaws, Bible stories treated as history--we may end up just listening to the chapter one week and then moving on, but first I need a little more time to decide if there's anything really historically relevant there), so fortunately, there's ALWAYS something more to do with Ancient Egypt!

The kids get in moods in which they seem to forget about formerly favorite pastimes, sometimes, so this week's logic is a board game of each kid's choice, to remind them that they like to play board games! That, combined with a library program, should round out our school week on a VERY fun note.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: We might go to the Indianapolis Museum of Art as a family, or we might send the kids to a pottery class and claim some grown-up time. We might go hiking, if the weather warms, or we might drag the bikes out and get them ready for a season of riding. We *might* order a couple more chicks from a local hatchery, although every time you ask me that one, my answer changes.

Homeschool Science: The Kids Re-Articulated a Chicken Skeleton

Meet Bocky:

For their Science Fair these young ones, interested in paleontology and chickens and lovers of gigantic, complicated, hands-on projects, decided to re-articulate a chicken skeleton. It WAS a gigantic, complicated project, and required a lot more parental assistance than you'd want in a school kid's Science Fair project, but we homeschoolers tend to make of things what we want, and we wanted this big, unwieldy, hands-on, fabulously educational project, and if that meant that the daddy had to get his hands dirty, too, then so be it.

Next time we do a project like this, I will use the university library to interlibrary loan a veterinary manual, because although we basically knew what went where, and we had a few diagrams to help us, there were a LOT of bones to sort through!

Spinal cord and ribs were pretty easy (although figuring out how they were ordered was a totally different matter)--

--but chickens have more long bones than we do, and their wrist bones and finger bones look weird, and yeah, we absolutely had leftover pieces when we were finished:

 But never you mind about that, because Bocky (yes, the children named their chicken skeleton, sigh...) came together just fine regardless:

You can see where Matt wired the spinal column, which was a suggestion from the only other person in the known universe to ever re-articulate a chicken skeleton for fun, but for everything else he used hot glue. LOTS of hot glue.

It was a big challenge for the kids to not pull that wishbone! I'm pretty proud of them for showing the self-restraint necessary there. 

The beak dissolved in our lye solution, but the claws didn't. Huh!

Although this project wasn't terribly well-suited to the capabilities and attention spans of a seven- and nine-year-old, I'm still really glad that we did it. The kids got to see what a genuinely difficult, real-life challenge looks like, one without one set answer and varies avenues of solutions, not all of which pan out. We tried several methods of obtaining a chicken carcass before we finally found one. We tried several ways to make certain bones fit onto the skeleton, and still weren't sure that we'd settled on the correct one.

The kids also learned a LOT about anatomy, and a lot about paleontology, too, I think. In her presentation, Will compared the work that they'd done with the work that paleontologists do, and commented that paleontology, too, must be frustrating sometimes, but it must feel great to complete a dinosaur skeleton. In Syd's presentation, she rattled off a bunch of human bones and pointed to their locations on their plaster of Paris human skeleton as if it was no big feat--she'd been thinking about those bones and where they go on people and chickens for ages by then!

I learned that projects like this are best done in the summer or fall, and in the future, if necessary, I will put the kids off until then. I was NOT happy buying a random frozen chicken carcass from an international grocery, after our attempts to source one locally from several places came up totally empty. I really wanted a local chicken who had lived a happy life, but I just had no idea we'd not be able to get one at this time of year. I feel a pull, sometimes, between what I want to express about my own ethics and the academic enrichment that I want to give the kids--I don't want to teach the children to kill on purpose, but I want Will to have the insect collection that she wants. I don't want to teach the children that it's okay to buy whatever dead animal that they want from whatever place is selling it, without caring how that animal was treated when it was alive, but I want them to have the carcass that they want to dissect. How does one raise a future entomologist without letting her make an insect collection? How does one raise a future doctor without letting her dissect? And of course, how does one raise a human to be compassionate towards animals while letting her kill bugs and dissect factory-farmed chicken carcasses?

From now on, I figure, I let them do what they want to do, but only in the most humane way to do it. The kid wants a bug collection? I guess that's why I have seven university library books on entomology on my bookshelf right now, trying to figure out which type of killing jar works the quickest. The kid wants to dissect a rabbit next (because she does)? Fine, but we're waiting until the fall, when we can get a nice meat rabbit carcass from a local farm that we know about. 

It may take me that long, anyway, to find and decipher a veterinary textbook on rabbits. 

Work Plans for the Week of February 3, 2014: Science and Survival Kits

 MONDAY: We're still happily moving through one chapter a week in Song School Latin (I forgot to update our work plans with this week's chapters--oops!), and the kids are retaining the vocabulary well, and although *I'm* ready for them to get some grammar and conjugations/declensions in, as long as they're engaged and absorbing the material and progressing, we'll go at the textbook's pace.

The kids didn't practice their instruments as much as they should have last week, so we may have to repeat those lessons this week, but most of our time and energy today is going into rehearsal for tonight's Science Fair. Completing the re-articulation of the chicken skeleton took so much time that I'm letting the kids do much of their presentations without a written report to refer to, but this might have been a mistake, too, in that it takes, of course, much more practice to get that sort of presentation down pat.

This week, the kids are going to math class just once (I think they found the two days last week a little much), so we've got space in the schedule for a hands-on unit. Although we did pattern blocks in this space for several weeks, the kids are actively (if slowly, ahem) memorizing the multiplication tables currently, so I'll be keeping a hands-on multiplication activity there until the tables are mastered.

We already did our volunteer gig for the day, and tonight is the Science Fair!

TUESDAY: Math Mammoth and First Language Lessons Level 3 are always easy to schedule, and since I spend hours on Sundays creating these lesson plans, it's a relief to be able to have a few things that I can simply pop into place. The survival kit, however, is likely to take up quite a bit more time--the kids have to prioritize their list based on the budget I'm giving them, and then we'll actually have to go shopping for these supplies. Since I try not to run errands with the kids during the day, a mid-morning shopping trip may seem like quite the adventure!

Will still has a little work to do on her World Thinking Day badge, but Syd is finished and can choose another badge to start earning. We're also going to participate, I *think*, in the Great Backyard Bird Count, and so our science unit for a few weeks will concern birds.

WEDNESDAY: This is one of those rare weeks in which Will has to skip aerial silks entirely (although thank goodness their scheduling system is set up so that we don't have to pay for a class we're not going to attend), but both kids are going to be thrilled to learn that their LEGO club is back after its long winter hiatus.

The subject of this month's Magic Tree House Club meeting--Earthquake in the Early Morning--is well-timed with our California study, especially since I'd been considering drawing out that study a little longer to include some earthquake activities.

THURSDAY: What with ice skating with friends and having another friend over for the afternoon, this will be a short school day. We're ditching art for a couple of weeks in favor of Valentine's Day crafting, but the kids' individual studies are still continuing--I hope that Syd will start actually constructing her dress this week, and Will is going to create a manual version of one of the first computer games.

FRIDAY: The kids claim that their teacher is going to bring cookies to math class on this day, so they're pretty excited about it already. WE are not going to be having cookies here at home, but we will be scrapbooking, completing our mapwork activity for our The Story of the World chapter, and finishing that survival kit.

I'm most excited about the Olympics unit that we'll be working on throughout the Winter Olympics. I'm hoping to set up a somewhat elaborate Olympic nations pin flag work for the kids to do on this day, but that involves plenty of prep work for me this week, so it's a good thing that I always plan to be busy!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: The kids have their all-day nature class this weekend, and we've also got a party at our local YMCA, chess club, and swimming with friends. But with no looming Science Fair presentations to rehearse and no chicken skeletons to re-articulate, we'll also have loads of happy downtime...

...which I need. I am going to be happy to see the backside of that chicken skeleton, I tell you what!

Homeschool Science: Comparison of the Human Skeleton to the Chicken Skeleton

Hallelujah, we finally have a complete chicken carcass! Although we eventually had to drive up to Indianapolis to find one, the trip was, of course, a fabulous adventure, since the frozen carcass turned out to be available at our favorite international grocery, Saraga. We therefore came home with many, MANY food items other than that chicken carcass, including (but not limited to) sheet-cake-sized wafer cookies, an energy drink that Matt could bear to take only one sip of, a barley drink that I could bear to take only one sip of, a couple of neon-colored Asian sodas that the girls gulped down happily, many varieties of steamed buns, many more varieties of Ramen, plantains, sweet limes, a very prickly fruit-like thing that draws blood when you touch it, and this fifteen-pound jackfruit:

The preparation of that chicken carcass is a gruesome tale for another day, however; until then, I bring you the story of another portion of this Science Fair project, already happily completed and its presentation rehearsed. I give you, my friends...

The Comparison of the Human Skeleton to the Chicken Skeleton!!!

Even in animals as seemingly different as humans and chickens, many aspects of their skeletal systems are similar. Both humans and chickens, for instance, have many bones that serve the same function, and that therefore have identical names. As part of their research, the kids created a visual aid that illustrates some of these identical bones.

Although a paper diagram would work just as well, for bigger impact the kids first created a plaster of Paris human skeleton from a kit that we own. Will glued the skeleton to some stash mat board, but the whole thing looked so rickety, and plaster of Paris is so brittle, that I sneaked in behind her and glued it better--shh, don't tell!

Using paper diagrams of a human skeleton and a chicken skeleton, then, the kids collaborated in finding the identically-named bones on each skeleton and coloring them the same color:

With my kids, fighting is inevitable, but I was impressed to see that they did eventually manage to come together, divide their labor equitably, and, yes, collaborate! Homeschool kids being socialized to group work: check!

Using the paper human skeleton diagram, the kids then selected matching paint colors from our set of artist's acrylics (I think these have better coverage, and are thus easier for the kids to work with, than craft acrylics) and painted their plaster of Paris human skeleton to match the diagram:

Will cut out the paper chicken skeleton diagram and glued it on, and we called that project done and done!

It turned out great, because it really does illustrate some interesting similarities between humans and chickens. Completely coincidentally, the chicken skeleton diagram is also in very nearly correct proportion to the human skeleton diagram:

The kids have some more research to do and a report to write with me, but my hope is that they and Matt will just make this chicken skeleton re-articulation magically appear by Science Fair day. I can't 100% promise you photos and a discussion of the process, because I only write on subjects that definitely won't make me vomit.

Work Plans for the Week of January 27, 2014: Plenty of Projects

MONDAY: For some reason, Monday was an excellent school day. The kids both know enough Latin vocabulary now that we can cobble together both fun phrases ("Do you remember when Gracie was an infans feles?") and insert Latin words into our regular speech ("I SAID stop kicking open that porta!"), which seems to have made them more invested in learning new words. This week we also learned several Christmas words (the Latin textbook that we're currently using is NOT secular, but considering Latin's long tradition in the church, and how that played a huge part in keeping Latin alive and relevant through the medieval period, I'll allow it), so I found some Christmas hymns sung in Latin for us to listen to as we worked, and the children enjoyed this greatly.

There was no protest, either, over math--Syd finds rounding easy, so she didn't throw a fit, and Will actually enjoyed creating line graphs, so she didn't throw a fit, either!--or music. Syd is still happily working through a set of free piano lessons online (I don't know, yet, what I'll do when she finishes those--find more? Enroll her in formal lessons?), and Will was much happier to learn her song when I sat her down and had her record every note of her song on a series of recorder fingering diagrams--it's like written music for a kid who can't yet read music!

The kids have been interested in survival skills since their first nature class earlier this year, and their homework for that class is to create a survival kit for the car, so we'll be working on that in the next couple of weeks. Yet another thing that I love about homeschooling is the ability to integrate the kids' homework for their extracurricular activities into their school days.

TUESDAY: Although we STILL do not have a chicken carcass to work with, both kids are working on their Science Fair project right this moment, while we listen to various versions of "Dry Bones" on Spotify. I will not worry about that chicken carcass right now. Other continuing projects for today include more work on the World Thinking Day badges (Syd finished her comparative analysis and her art project last week, but Will still needs to do her research project, and they both need to start their service project) and on the scrapbook for our California vacation.

Math is working a little differently this week--both kids wanted to attend two math classes this week, instead of one, so that plus Math Mammoth equals a whole week of math! I'm not ashamed to admit that it was a big time-saver to not have to plan out a hands-on math lesson this week, although in theory I do prefer that we have a hands-on math day at home, where I can offer enrichment on a relevant concept and evaluate their mastery of that concept. If they continue to choose to attend both classes, I may have to rethink our weekly math schedule. First Language Lessons, however, keeps tooling along just fine--it's still a little too easy for Will, but what we're doing now is at least good spelling practice for her. I have found that even though the kids are on the same chapter each week, I still need to work with them separately, so I can move faster through the material with Will and slower with Syd. So much for time-saving grammar studies!

WEDNESDAY: I'm not in love with having two extracurricular activities scheduled on the same day; next session, I'll try again, and perhaps one day I'll have a time that I actually like for horseback riding lessons.

Just recently, we've starting watching Global Wrap together every week, and if we keep enjoying it, I'll also add it to the Wednesday schedule, just so we don't forget about it.

THURSDAY: Syd and I will have some time to work on her T-shirt dress while Will explores more on Scratch; I don't think she's actually worked herself up to creating a program, although she keeps expressing interest in it, so I'll keep giving her a set time to play around with it. And I think we're all going to enjoy this week's Drawing With Children lesson, so this should be a fun day!

If we don't have a boiled down, bleached out chicken skeleton to start re-articulating by this day, I don't know what we're going to do. So much for my relaxed Science Fair prep schedule!

FRIDAY: More Science Fair prep, more California scrapbooking, more World Thinking Day badge activities, and another math class! In addition, we're *finally* starting the next chapter of The Story of the World, which means coloring pages, Jim Weiss' narration, and quiz questions.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: We've got a celebration for the Year of the Horse at the library and a radio building workshop at our local hands-on science museum, a Goodwill store-wide sale that Syd and I might be visiting to seek out green sequined formal wear, and hopefully just the very last touches to put on a Science Fair project.

Because what could be a better family bonding activity than re-articulating a chicken skeleton together?