Homeschool Science: A Crystals Study

As I am wont to do, I collected an immense amount of resources for our study of mineral crystallization, and we ended up with a rather nice crystals study apart from our overarching inquiry into rocks and minerals. In fact, I may have been the one most fascinated by our little rabbit trail into crystals!

There were two main parts to our crystals study: we modeled crystals, so that we could understand their formation, and we made them, so that we could observe and identify them.

Modeling Crystals

crystal paper models. You can search for and find these on Ellen McHenry's website which, if you haven't been to it before, I highly recommend that you give it a browse--it's amazing! Both of my kids could make these paper models independently, and each one represents not just one basic crystal shape, but also includes information about that shape right on it, excellent for ready reference and research. After the kids made these and we studied them, I added them to the science shelves in my homeschool closet as a permanent resource.

mineral chemical composition game. This is also on Ellen McHenry's website, and it's not actually about modeling crystals, but if you want to understand why crystals are different and not all the same shape, then you should learn that they have different chemical compositions, and what some of those chemical compositions are. I print the game pieces out on white cardstock, the kids color them in with watercolor pencils (this is an excellent research project, as of course you want to color them in realistically!), we cut them out, and then we play!

After you roll your elements, you have to look to see if you can build any minerals from the combination.

Lucky me!

Zometool crystals. These were the most fascinating models to build, because you didn't know what you were going to get--you had to figure out for yourself how to logically follow the form, and then you got it!

crystal diagrams. The text on this page is pretty sophisticated, but the diagram can be printed large-scale for reference.

Making Crystals

You can't make the crystals that form out of magma, alas, but you can make the crystals that evaporate out of solution. The following recipes are all ones that involve supersaturating something, then waiting for it to evaporate out in crystal form:

rock candy (ie. sugar): Rock candy never looks as nice for us as it does in other people's tutorials, and guarding against ants is always a huge problem. Nevertheless, this one is special because after you've observed it, checked it out under the microscope, and tried to count the sides of its crystals, you can eat it. Kids LOVE this one.

stalactites and stalagmites. We didn't make these models, but I have the idea in my pocket for a caves unit that I'd like to complete this year. 

Epsom salts. 

borax. These particular crystals are also super fun to grow on a pipe cleaner. 

egg geodes. We grew our crystals mainly in Petri dishes, but these egg ones would make a lovely Easter decoration.

 seashell crystals. Like the egg geodes, but in seashells! You can also use rocks, or whatever else you can think of that has a bit of a tooth to it.

aragonite crystals. 

crystals on charcoal.

Wayne This and That's Crystals page. I haven't tried any of his tutes, but his website also includes his X-Files fanfiction, the "best vanilla pudding recipe," and a page about how much he loves bettas. So, basically it's pretty great.

alum crystals.

Reference Materials

A lot of books about minerals are really dry, and a lot of other books about crystals are all about their woo-woo energies, but her are some that we found useful and enjoyable:

All of Our Favorite Things for May

This isn't, like, one of those recurring list things, or at least, I don't think it is. I just have a bunch of random favorites that I've been wanting to tell you about!

Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson

Our university's theatre department did a production of this, and Matt and I went to it. If you're into Hamilton, or politics, or punk, or emo, or you don't understand what the deal is with Donald Trump, then you totally have to find a way to see this. Andrew Jackson actually makes quite a convincing emo rock star, but unlike Hamilton, he's not actually redeemable, so there's an extra tension running throughout the entire show.

Parasitology

I actually started this series on audiobook over a year ago, then had to return it to the library but couldn't forget about it, so when I was browsing the Sci-Fi/Fantasy shelves a few weeks ago to help Will find books (have I mentioned yet that Will is now choosing books from the adult section of the library? She's read everything in the children and teen sections already!), I snatched all three and then didn't put them down until I'd finished.

Without spoiling what happens, I'll just tell you that the books take place in the near future, where people have realized that our society's obsession with germs and hygiene has destroyed our immune systems. To solve this problem, a company creates a genetically-altered tapeworm that will both correct this and can be also administer long-term medications for problems like diabetes or high blood pressure.

What could possibly go wrong?

And that's about where chapter one begins.

Minecraft servers

Syd has discovered them, and they're apparently pretty great. Her favorite server is Planet Minecraft, with its minigames, and she will often spend her precious screentime after school helping Team Frost to victory in paintball, or that weird jumping game, or all those other games whose rules I can't figure out.

I was impressed that Syd managed to figure out how to get herself onto these servers all by herself (thank you, Instructables!), since she often uses helplessness as a defense mechanism when she doesn't want to do something, ie. "Oh, subtraction! But I can't subtract! I can't subtract a single thing! Is nine minus five sixty-seven? See, I just can't do it! It's impossible," and on and on and on. I've also started checking out some Minecraft manuals for her from the library, things like how to do mods or images of notable constructions, and she's begun to talk about these great engineery things, like how to program Redstone to make a trapdoor that will drop you into lava, and how to booby-trap your treasure chest. 

Spoiler alert: it involves more lava.

CNN Student News

I have wanted to find a kid-friendly current events for YEARS. I was all about News-O-Matic for a little while, but it just wasn't updated often enough, and it didn't have enough NEWS news, if that makes sense. Basically, I wanted news that didn't cover rapes and murders and other scary things, but did cover politics and wars and international affairs. I just couldn't seem to find the perfect combination, until I happened upon CNN Student News. Every weekday, they post a ten-minute news video that's kid-friendly, but does cover politics and wars and international affairs. They've got science features, and human interest stories, and interesting tech updates, and the host ends every video with something ridiculous, like a million puns based on the last news clip. He cracks us up every. Single. Time.

VERY bizarre Youtube channel

So fair warning--Matt HATES this Youtube channel, but for some reason I cannot stop watching this woman! I was drinking wine and surfing Youtube one night--you know, as you do--and somehow I ended up watching a twenty-minute video of a woman sitting on her kitchen floor, bawling her eyes out, and explaining all about how her boyfriend had broken up with her. Friends, I could not look away! Also, she said ALL the things. So many details. So much awkward. And sometimes, she would just stop talking and just sob openly into the camera for minutes at at time. It was one of the craziest things that I have ever seen on Youtube, and that's including the fact that every single time I'm on Youtube, I end up watching videos about the Illuminati or aliens. Seriously, I'll start off by searching for cat videos and end up learning about how they're a conspiracy by the Illuminati to send messages to our alien overlords. And still, this Youtube channel is crazier.

Anyway, she later deleted this specific video, but it turns out that she's somewhat of a thing on Youtube, and you can find OTHER people making OTHER videos that discuss that one and try to dissect the truth behind it... you know, like if it was maybe aliens or Illuminati. Something like that. And she posts, like every day, a ten-minute video of her babbling on while she's driving in her car, or these awkward dance performances, or a round-up of her various "routines," which all seem to involve a lot of Starbucks and Red Vines and professional make-up artists. She's definitely not for kids, and based on the fact that she also has a channel of videos of her eating stuff that I'm 100% sure is something sexual, she's really probably not for most adults, either, but somehow watching her makes me feel better. The past year or so had been hard for me in a lot of ways--in fact, I've had the kind of year that's often like a kick to the stomach, and that has me deeply questioning whether or not I have the emotional coping skills to deal with it, and while watching this chick is not, I'd say, emotionally healthy by any means, it is somehow very comforting to watch this cheerful, peppy, duck-lipped woman just go ahead and fly her freak flag every single day like it ain't no thang.

Vat 19

Will is obsessed with this Youtube channel, which is really just a series of commercials for the online store, but man, are they clever commercials! Again, they are not for little kids, as this very disturbing/very funny commercial for a toy gummy bear anatomy kit can attest, but the entire family will often get sucked into watching them with Will, and now we're all in research mode for how to make our own giant gummies.

Okay, enough randomness! The cat is putting muddy pawprints onto the paperwork on my desk, the kids need me to cook them egg sandwiches and dial up CNN Student News, and I have an, I kid you not, 21-item to-do list for Syd's Minecraft birthday party on Friday, and I just decided to add another couple of items to it, as I suddenly thought that wouldn't it be even cuter if the spawn eggs in the Spawn Egg Hunt were actually cascarones, and then the kids could have a cascarone fight afterwards!

I'll be sure to let you know how that, and the cardboard box Creeper pinata, and the Minecraft cake, and Zombie Tag, and the paint-your-own-Minecraft-sword station turn out!

Pom-Pom Pals: Our Obsession Begins

As of now, knowing what I know, having done what I have done, I cannot fathom how, until last week, I have NEVER made a pom pom by hand. 

I mean, what?

I LOVE making stuff by hand! I LOVE quick and easy little crafties! I love cute little crafties! I love kid-friendly little crafties!

Friends, how have I NEVER made pom poms before, and even more outrageously, how have I NEVER introduced the children to pom pom making before?!?

Fortunately, as of last week, that has all been rectified. A publicist sent me a free copy of Pom-Pom Pals: Animals, and as the kids and I are winging our homeschool for these couple of short weeks (grandparent visits, big fashion shows, and a multi-day camping trip with friends have been keeping us quite busy without my set-in-stone by-the-week lesson plans, thank you very much), one day last week it, along with a documentary on the brown bear of Alaska, a Math Mammoth lesson and some cursive copywork, a couple of books about rocks, and a long hike through our woods to hunt for morels seemed like just the way to spend our school day.

It's not often that we start a craft with me just as ignorant about how it's done as the kids, and it was fun to see them read the instructions, more or less, grab the yarn, and set off making pom poms without looking to me for direction:

Syd let me help her make one of the pom poms for her lion--

--but Will worked completely independently the entire time--

--taking breaks only to snuggle the cat:

I mean, of course.

We actually don't work with yarn that often, which made this particular project much more of a process-based, explore-the-yarn-and-all-its-possibilities project than one in which a specific result must be obtained, and yet, with the addition of hot glue and felt and more miniature pom poms--

 --adorable results were obtained:

We spent part of today making more pom poms, just for fun--

--and I have to say that when I searched Pinterest for "pom pom crafts," because of COURSE I searched Pinterest for "pom pom crafts!!!", I found so many ridiculously cute things to do with them that I see no reason to ever stop making pom poms.

In fact, I kinda hope to make it to the craft store this weekend to buy yarn in Girl Scout colors, because I'm thinking pom pom hair bands would look SUPER cute with their Girl Scout uniforms, right?

Edible Plant and Animal Cells

For the past few weeks, the kids have been completing a weekly lesson in Zoology for Kids (given to us for free from the publisher). We've done biology studies off and on for our entire time homeschooling so far--my favorites have been the animal unit studies that we did a couple of summers ago, involving classification, anatomy, and animal care, and the endangered animal unit study that we did for much of last semester--and it's always been a hit with the kids.

The units are always pretty much led by me, however, in that I take a kid's interest, create some projects that will explore it, assign some research and the reference materials, and dictate guidelines. Zoology for Kids is a nice break for that, in that it's written to the kids, down to having a glossary in the back of the book to explain the big words, and most of the activities in the book can be done completely independently--I don't even have to be in the room!

The one exception to that is this edible cell model, and only because we had to make a special trip to the store for the decorating supplies--one thing that I do NOT need is a pantry full of Reese's Cups and M&Ms and Twizzlers. Since I was helping out, anyway, I changed the format from cake to cookie (cookies are yummier!) and assigned one kid to make an animal cell and the other kid to make a plant cell:

I required the kids to learn all the parts, but I did not require them to learn what each part does--that's more depth than the book requires, and rather than lead us down a rabbit trail of cell biology, I figured I'd just let them go with this until the next time we visit cells:

These kids LOVE edible projects!

Who wouldn't, though, right? I mean, it's a plant cell, AND it's candy!

Using Board Books for Foreign Language Study, and other Adventures in Mandarin

For years, I had been looking forward to outsourcing the children's foreign language study. I'm confident at imparting a reading/translation knowledge of any of the languages that I, myself have a [very much lapsed] reading/translating knowledge of (Latin, Attic Greek, Spanish, Icelandic, Old Norse, Middle Welsh, Old English), but I'd rather that they learn pronunciation for extant languages from native speakers.

What I did not realize, however, and yet should have, I suppose, is that even with the children taking a foreign language class, as they are this semester--Mandarin Chinese, through a grant program at our local university--there would still be a lot of work for ME! This isn't just free time in my school schedule, alas. The kids have homework, and of course they must practice daily, and since they're crap at telling me what they did/learned/were assigned in class, of course I must look it up for myself, then find the resources to get them the pronunciation models that they need to accurately review their vocabulary each day.

So each weekend, part of my lesson planning for the coming week is to look up what the kids did in Mandarin class that Saturday, and find the resources to support that particular vocabulary review. The instructors provide excellent cultural enrichment during class, but if I find anything extra that fits with what they did, I also throw that in.

My absolute favorite resource is this YouTube channel, Learn Chinese with Emma. So far, I've managed to find a video from her that covers every single piece of new vocabulary that the children have studied.

There are the basic greetings:

The numbers:

Helpful vocabulary for the New Year celebration:

The seasons:

And new for this week, family members:

One thing that works GREAT for learning a foreign language is board books. You know board books--those laminated cardboard books that they give to babies so that their slobber doesn't dissolve them and they can't rip them up. They're short, because babies have short attention spans, and they have simple vocabulary, because babies don't know many words, and generally the vocabulary is pretty basic, because you want your baby to learn "blue" and "truck" before she learns "disestablishmentarianism" and "fuschia." We use the dual-language approach to reading that I learned from Miss Nancy in toddler Spanish playgroup many, many, many [10] years ago: you read what you can read in the target language, and read everything else in English. Here's Syd practicing her Mandarin vocabulary with a dual-language board book:


You can hear the very beginnings of the tones that she needs to use. Will is still very much "tone deaf," but I'm glad that they're getting the exposure to it. It'll be easier to hear when their study continues, whether that's next semester or in 20 years, you know?

Now that the kids have this much vocab under their belts, I think my lesson plans will begin to reflect an enrichment activity for Mandarin every week--this totally defeats any freedom in my schedule that outsourcing the language provided, but, eh. The kids need it for the reinforcement, and the immersion is fun!

One area that I still need help in supporting them is the written language. As far as I can tell, the class doesn't focus on it, but all the new vocabulary is also written down for the children, so they could certainly learn to read it. I'd like them to learn to write it, as well, but I do not have the first idea about how to start with that. Perhaps my research for these enrichment plans will lead me in the right direction...

So, knowing that we're still very much in the middle of this first Mandarin language class, here are some of the reading/viewing listening resources that we've been enjoying so far:

World Thinking Day 2015: A Trip to Mongolia

In our council, the Girl Scouts celebrate World Thinking Day with a giant Geography Fair. It's even more fun than a regular academic fair, because more kids working together means MORE elaborate displays, MORE games and activities, MORE food to taste, and MORE presentations--what homeschooler wouldn't love that?!?

My troop, led by another mom who speaks the language, has traveled there, and thus has lots of knowledge plus cool souvenirs to share, presented on Mongolia. The girls all worked on different parts of the display, and it came out really well--very informative, very elaborate, but clearly kid-made all the way through:

As you can see, we've got photos and facts about Mongolia, info about Mongolian horses and Genghis Khan, the Girl Scout motto in Mongolia, its map and flag, demonstrations of a game played with sheep ankle bones, and food samples of fried bread and salty, milky tea. 

I'm impressed that I managed to get photos of the display as a whole looking like that, because most of the time it looked like this:

Yeah, there were a LOT of kids there. 

Fortunately, my troop has enough kiddos that the girls could trade off offering food samples, stamping passports, demonstrating the game (that's what my two mostly did)--

--and visiting all the other countries at the festival. They also presented a puppet show of a Mongolian folk tale, including making the decorated curtain, making the puppets, and practicing telling the story over and over and over again so that they could do it unscripted.

It was an awesome experience for the kids, and just the kind of cross-curricular, high-intensity, immersive, FUN academics that I like for them to have.

In our family, we also used the weeks when we were preparing for this festival as a short unit on Mongolia, so the kids researched and did their display as part of their schoolwork, researched Mongolian horses, completed the Story of the World chapters on Genghis Khan, and learned to recognize Mongolian music (there's a ton on Spotify!). Here are some of the reading/watching/listening resources that we enjoyed during this unit:

Ready-Reference Zoo Animal Fact Cards for the Louisville Zoo

The Louisville Zoo has created a great set of pdf fact cards for most of their zoo animals. They're excellent for prep work or further research, but for our big trip to the zoo, I wanted to have them handy for ready reference, so Will and I, with a lot of tricky printing, cutting, pasting, and laminating, made them that way!

I printed each zoo animal pdf fact card on cardstock at the setting of four pages to a page; this made each full-page pdf card print at one-quarter of its original size, a good, handy size for carrying around. Of course, you have to click on and print each new animal card separately, which means that your printer will want to use a fresh piece of cardstock for each one, so every now and then I went back to the printer and flipped the printed pages around so that new cards would print on the unused space of the already-printed cards. Saving cardstock is important!

When all the cards were printed I cut them to size with my guillotine paper cutter. Some animals' info extended onto a second page, so I glued those back-to-back with a glue stick so that you can flip the page over to the back side to read the rest of the info. Some animal cards didn't have a photo of the animal included, so for those I put Will to work with Google Images, finding a photo of each animal and printing it onto copy paper to cut out and glue to the back of each card:

She LOVED this job!

After all the cards were prepped, we laminated them, cut them apart, hole punched them, alphabetized them, and put them on a book ring (well, it's actually a shower curtain hook, but it's serving as a book ring):

I could not have been happier with how this ring of fact cards worked at the Louisville Zoo. As the Keeper of the Cards, I had a fabulous time looking up each animal as we came across it, and regaling the family with random facts--"The addax antelope can go months without water!" "Due to global warming, grizzly bears and polar bears are starting to mix their territories, and they're breeding together!" Since I find less entertainment in animal watching than anyone else in the family, this task kept me entertained quite nicely.

The animal card are robust enough that they can be used for our later research and other projects--each card has a partial order of classification, the animal's range and habitat, more information about its reproduction than you'd ever want to know, its diet in the wild and at the zoo, some notes on behavior and other points of interest, and its status in the wild. They'll be good for sorting as we continue our study of the order of classification, and we'll definitely be taking them to other zoos.

Soooo... lot of work, yes, but well worth the effort.

Sesame Street to Gettysburg

Although the girls had been studying extensively for this and they did enjoy the experience, this last stop was absolutely for me and Matt.

It's a rare thing for us, this ability to do something that we adults want to do, and I'm cherishing the girls' new maturity that's allowing it for us. It's been a LONG time since a kid of mine threw a fit in the modern art museum (although that experience was so traumatic that we have perhaps never been to a modern art museum since). And so, on the last day of our trip, after hotel breakfast and Willow's chess class (you've got to love online classes for vacationing without learning loss!) we drove to Gettysburg, just because Matt and I really, really wanted to see it:

Gettysburg is actually a great place to visit with kids--it's outdoors, so they can do a lot of running around; you pretty much have to drive to the different sites, so they can get a break with air conditioning and a book fairly often; and the monuments are large-scale and eminently climbable:

The first thing that we did was run into the Visitor's Center just to buy a self-guided audio car tour and Guide to Gettysburg Battlefield Monuments: Find Every Monument and Tablet in the Park, and then we spent the next few hours following the tour (which was incredible--tons of context, detailed explanation of what you were looking at everywhere you went, thrilling storytelling with sound effects. It completely made our trip):

The kids LOVED the artillery.

Thanks to Killer Angels, I have a huge soft spot for Buford and Reynolds, and so McPherson Ridge, the first engagement in the battle, was my favorite stop:

I was super sad about Reynolds dying.

Fortunately, the girls love audiobooks, so the audio car tour was the perfect way to see the battlefield: we'd listen to the stories, listen to the orientation at our stop, get out and run around and see stuff, and then climb back into the car to listen to more stories.

Sydney's favorite stop was Oak Ridge; she listened with bated breath to the audio tour's description of brave Sallie, the pet dog of the Pennsylvania Volunteers, and when she learned that there was actually a monument to Sallie on Oak Ridge, I handed her our book of battlefield monuments and told her that we'd stop at it if she could find it, so she did!

Willow really liked best climbing the huge fire tower that allows you to overlook the locations of the second day of fighting. Seriously, there were So. Many. Stairs, but I have really committed myself to a healthier body, and repeating to myself all the way, "This is good, healthy activity!" I climbed those damn stairs (something that I actually don't think I could have done three months, 14 pounds, and four inches ago), and the view from the top...

Was excellent:

Even though my home state was on the wrong side of the war, I did manage a shout-out:

Some of my peeps were apparently also paying their respects there:

Again thanks to Killer Angels, Little Round Top is Matt's favorite spot in the battlefield:

Bayonets fixed, Chamberlain's brave men prepare to charge down the hill!

He has a special place in his heart for Chamberlain, whose story is pretty epic. Also, he helped hold Little Round Top against all this:

The High Water Mark of the Confederacy is also an amazing spot, and yes, my bloodthirsty little soldiers are attempting to cross the line and shoot you:

You can actually hike the fields that the Confederate soldiers charged across, right from the statue of Lee at the center of the Confederate line to the statue of Meade at the center of the Union line. We saved that for another day, however.

We did not finish memorizing the Gettysburg Address in time to recite it at the spot where Lincoln originally read it, alas, so Will read it for us, instead:

We did see the cemetery that he dedicated, at least--

--and the spot where it was read, and the memorial to it--

--so when we finally finish, we'll be able to imagine the appropriate setting for our recitation.

Again, we closed the park down. We had to blow through the museum--

Actual cannonballs fired at Ft. Sumter--very cool context for the girls, since  they've memorized that conflict.

--and zip through the gift shop before they kicked us out at the end of the day.

It had been a long day, through which we had sustained ourselves on peanut butter sandwiches, clementines, granola bars, and tortilla chips, so we celebrated this final stop on our road trip with a late afternoon visit to a restaurant named, of COURSE, General Pickett's Buffet.

It was our last charge, you could say...

The girls and I did a ton of prep work for our trip to Gettysburg. Here are our favorite resources:


Will read most of those independently--she's such an avid reader that it's an easy way to boost her contextual understanding of a topic. We all did the picture books and documentaries together, but for Lincoln, I only had the girls watch the first scene with me, the one in which Lincoln visits the battlefield and hears the soldiers reciting his Gettysburg Address.

You can also check out my Civil War Pinboard for the educational links, resources, coloring pages, memory work cards, timelines, artifact images, etc. that we used. I have a playlist on Spotify for all the music from the Civil War, which the girls LOVED listening to (awkward as it was to have Sydney suddenly bursting out with "Dixie" at random times in public places), as well as a great audio version of the Gettysburg Address that's helping with our memorization, but Spotify won't let me embed it. The good news is that you can search Spotify yourself, for something like "songs of Civil War," and find all the same as me.