Tutorial: Make an Underwater Volcano Erupt in a Test Tube

Happy Science Fair, everyone!

Our homeschool group's Science Fair was last week, and it's the first time that the girls have not shared a single project. This year, Sydney's project was on measuring birds--

--and Willow's project was on underwater volcanoes:

For Sydney's project, she and Matt researched a few birds of North America (primarily through The North American Bird Coloring Book ), then together they drew them to scale, colored them realistically, and aligned them up with an outline of Miss Syd, herself, to show their sizes in relation to her.

Will researched underwater volcanoes using library books, Primary Search articles (an EBSCO search engine for elementary children), and Netflix documentaries, took notes, wrote a report, colored a world map and drew in the Ring of Fire, and cut out pictures of underwater volcanoes to glue to her project board, which may not look very tidy, but does look as if she did it independently, which she did.

She also did a demonstration of an underwater volcano in a test tube:

To do this demonstration for yourself, you need a narrow test tube, a heat gun (we also use these for our melted crayon canvas art), sand, water, and crayon bits.

1. Drop a peeled bit of crayon into the bottom of a test tube, then cover it with a deep layer of sand, and then pour water on top. If you haven't covered the crayon deeply enough, the water will force the crayon up over the sand, since it's less dense--if this happens, gently pour in more sand on top. Will also had good luck pouring in water, then the crayon, and then the sand, to avoid the sudden force of the water.
2. As you work, explain to your audience that the sand is the ocean floor, the crayon is the solid rock in the lower crust of the earth, and the water is the ocean water.
3. Aim the heat gun close to the test tube (which is heat resistant--you ARE using a test tube, right?), approximately where you remember the crayon being, and turn it on high. You don't have to be too fussy about holding the test tube in a spot that's away from the heat gun--as long as you don't aim it at your fingers, you'll be fine.
4. Patiently hold the heat gun in the same spot for several seconds. You'll feel shocks and tremors in the tube as the heat gun (which represents an upwelling heat source from the earth's mantle) begins to melt the crayon, causing it to change shape underneath the sand.
5. The melted crayon is hot, and wants to rise above the cold water and the dense sand, so eventually it will erupt from underneath the sand. As it rises, the water will cool it and cause it to resolidify, and you can see how underwater volcano eruptions can form mountains, and then even islands.

With a lot of effort, you can clean the crayon wax off of the test tube, but frankly, I treat these test tubes as disposable once we've done this demonstration using them. Perhaps next we'll grow a little test tube demonstration garden in them!

A Full Set of Waldorf Ring Candles

I don't actually own a Waldorf ring. It's on my to-do list to make one (someday...), but the idea of candles specifically designed to fit into Waldorf rings wasn't even on my radar until several customers asked me for them.

And now I FINALLY have a full set of Waldorf ring candles listed:

The lighting isn't quite what I'd like with these--it can be VERY hard to accurately render such a wide variety of colors--but you do your best and move on, you know? If I decide later that I simply can no longer live with the purple tint to the photos, then I'll reshoot, but I'm surprised at how much I can live with if the alternative is putting forth a great deal more effort.

Kitten Portraits

When our foster kittens are just almost ready to go back to the shelter and find their adoptive families, I like to use a nice afternoon to take "kitten portraits"--photographs of each of the girls with each of the kittens, and one photograph of all of them together, as nice-looking as my amateur photography skills can manage.

The girls treasure their kitten portraits, as tender-hearted Sydney, especially, dearly misses her kitten buddies after they've gone, but I also like to print out an extra copy of each portrait to give to the shelter when we return the kittens. Now, kittens don't really need a lot of extra marketing, but I still like to give them the best odds that I can, and I think that everyone can agree that, while an animal shelter mug shot certainly makes a critter look more pathetic and in NEED of adoption, it takes a beautiful, sunny day, a happy and comfy animal, and a lot of time and patience to take a photo that lets a potential guardian see my little foster kittens as a pet and a best friend.

Here are our best friends:

Photographing kittens is hard. They don't "smile" like dogs do, and generally the best you can do is a photo in which they don't look like they're actively trying to escape. You can better see their happiness in candid shots, but candid shots of each kid with each kitten? Yikes!

So we may not get the best portrait of each foster kitten in our foster kitten portraits, true, but in each portrait, look at the kid. See the love in their faces? Those kittens put that there, and that's what I hope sells them to their future guardians.

Poetry Speaks: A Tricky Trick for Memorizing the U.S. Presidents in Chronological Order

Will has a real knack for memorizing. To be honest, I have a real knack for memorizing, too, but I primarily use my knack to memorize TV theme songs and jingles and pop music, prompting my poor Matt, who often has to listen to me show him how I can still sing "Ice, Ice Baby" in its entirety, to regularly ask me why I can't ever memorize anything normal and useful, like the directions to the Indianapolis Children's Museum, or my mother's birthday.

Knowing something about the benefits of a good memory, therefore, and seeing how Willow genuinely finds recitation from memory pleasurable, we've actually been doing quite a bit of classical-esque education around here lately. Of course, being a medieval scholar, I can't quite call the modern interpretation of classical education simply that with a straight face, but there you go, do with it what you will. In these early elementary years, the movement is all about rote memorization, and Willow enjoys rote memorization, so we're going with it a bit for now.

For math, we've been memorizing skip counting (which I lately got sick of, and moved Willow into coin arithmetic, which I'm happy to report she's proving quite adept at, thanks to the skip counting!); for geography, we're memorizing the countries of Africa (a nearly futile exercise, I know, as they keep changing); for grammar, we're about to start English and Latin grammar concurrently; for science, we're still doing mostly hands-on stuff; for handwriting, we're doing copywork of relevant facts from the other subjects; and for history, we're doing both Ancient history (through Story of the World) and U.S. history at the same time.

As a scaffold to U.S. history, I asked Willow to memorize the names of all the U.S. presidents in order--later, of course, we can do biographies and relevant dates for each president, but even just their names are important contextually, since, for example, in our study of Martin Luther King Jr. that we just finished up for now, Willow can pin him up historically with John F. Kennedy, since she knows that they were acquainted. That's extremely useful, because she also knows MLK's connection to segregation, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Civil Rights, so whenever she memorizes the dates of any one of those, she'll have approximate dates for all of them.

As a child, I memorized this poem of the presidents--the original, from A Young People's Speaker, ends with Grover Cleveland's first term. Some enterprising teacher, perhaps local to the Ft. Smith area, since the blogger who quotes the more recent rendition is also from my hometown, keeps adding to it. As a little kid, I memorized through Reagan. My little kid, however, gets to take it all the way to Obama:



It's a little devoid of affect, probably because she ends up miserable with a high fever later that evening, but you should see the kid when she really gets into it, standing on a chair and bellowing out her lines at the top of her lungs (which she thinks, correctly, is really funny).

And if you ever find yourselves at the same cocktail party, you'll know what party trick to ask her for--either that, or balloon animals!

Salt Dough Fossils with the Magic Tree House Club

The girls have been having a fabulous time in their Currclick Magic Tree House club, their first online class:

Every month in Magic Tree House Club there are quizzes, small presentations based on facts from the books, and a project. Both girls LOVE it! Will has a little buddy who's also in the club, and they chat together in the club's chat room (each on their own computer in their own house across town from each other) before the meeting. During the meeting, the leader, who is live on her webcam, asks questions to the kids, and they can answer by typing. She'll often acknowledge individual children and their answers, and both girls seem to think it's pretty darn great to get your name said live on webcam. The club meets once a week, but all the meetings in the same month cover the exact same material from the exact same book; this is actually pretty convenient, because although Willow attended the first week's meeting in March, Syd was napping during that hour. Syd wanted to attend the second week's meeting instead, but it turned out to be gorgeous outside that day and I didn't have the heart to call her inside to sit at the computer for an hour when the club's meeting time rolled around. Instead, Syd attended the third week's meeting, and Willow, who'd already done the entire thing weeks ago, was still drawn back in and stood beside her the entire time, helping her type her answers.

For March, the club read Dinosaurs before Dark--there were presentations on Pennsylvania and a few of the dinosaurs mentioned in the book, and a demonstration on making salt dough fossils. We waited to do these until after Syd had attended her club meeting, too, but in the week since, we have done this project THREE TIMES!

Yeah, it's fun.

You can probably figure out the premise on your own: fossils are impressions left by organisms or artifacts, and salt dough, since it's transformed by baking to be solid (reminiscent, sort of, to the way that fossils are made permanent in nature--not by the same process, of course, but it gives you the idea of how it can come about), can be used as a model to make impressions and show off the resulting fossils.

You'll need plenty of salt dough (here's my favorite salt dough recipe). While the salt dough shouldn't be crumbly, of course, it should be on the dry side, since if it's at all sticky it will pull at the artifact as you're lifting it up and thus won't make a true impression. Using my favorite recipe, I still kneaded in at least another 1/4 cup after it was otherwise mixed, until the salt dough felt perfectly smooth and slightly stiff. It also helps to refrigerate the dough for a few hours first, so you can feel free to make it ahead of time.

Tear off a piece of salt dough, roll it into a ball between your hands, and then flatten it with your hand right onto the baking sheet that you'll dry it on. Then you can press whatever artifacts you like--leaves, shells, toys, etc.--right into the dough, and lift them straight up again.

The girls did a few leaves and flowers, but it turns out that game piece fossils was really where the fun was at:

dominoes

Scrabble tile

We poked a straw completely through the dough at the top of the fossils to make a hole in case we wanted to hang them later, and then we dried them in a 200-degree oven for over two hours. 

I like my salt dough to be REALLY dry, so I let these actually begin to brown before I took them out:

And when they're finished, you can paint them!

Have I mentioned yet this Spring how thrilled I am to be back to doing all our messy crafts OUTDOORS?!? I remember when Sydney was a baby and how I'd never felt more joyful than I did at simply being able to allow her to eat her yogurt outside.

Because the baking is a little unpredictable, the salt dough fossils don't always turn out perfectly. Some, for example, can rise a bit, distorting the impression. It's great when this happens, though, because it demonstrates the fact that real fossils DO distort, and the result can look very different from the original impression.

periwinkle flower, now nearly unidentifiable

Do you like this little table that Matt dumpster-dived for me a few weeks ago?

Of course, I have to be over-the-top, so I added glitter to my fossils while the paint was still wet:

That particular fossil is now hanging from our key rack.

As for the other fossils, I'm not sure if we'll actually DO anything with them, but don't they look marvelous, all lined up in a row?

I can't believe it, but we made salt dough fossils AGAIN yesterday. This time, the kittens helped, but that's a story for another post.

Skipping

Sydney's been working hard at her skip counting lately. She can skip count by fives--


--and tens:


I've moved her to a first grade arithmetic workbook for math drills for a bit before we tackle more skipping, but Will, who thrives on rote memorization (go figure), is going to do the 25s and 50s and hundreds before she starts on money math drills.

As further proof of Willow's pleasure in verbal patterning and recall, I present to you this lovely ditty that she created:


Doesn't that just make you want to...I don't know, not eat breakfast?

Still Life for Sydney

Yes, there really is all that magenta:

In their shared bedroom, each of the girls has one long shelf that is for her stuff alone. They put their favorite toys there, their favorite artwork, their favorite natural finds, their various little ribbons and medals, etc. Sydney also has quite a stash of make-up and jewelry on her shelf, but that's the subject of another post, sigh.

I recently wrote a review for Inca-Eco yarn for Crafting a Green World; I allowed Sydney to choose the color of yarn that we received, and since her choice, Wine, complemented not only the paint on that bedroom wall (and our tulips!) but many of Sydney's treasures, AND fit her own personal color palette so well, I wrapped her special shelf with the yarn to make a better display for treasures such as this:

It looks so nice (in my humble opinion), that I'm now officially on the garage sale/thrift store lookout for other yarns in which to wrap the rest of the girls' shelves.