Homeschool Field Trip: Geo Fest at the Indiana State Museum

There are many things that I have to do this month:

Girl Scout cookies. Seriously, Friends. My children have been selling ALL THE COOKIES! I am doing my darnedest to support the little lambs in their endeavors, but the fact that this requires, me, as well, to pretty much sell all the cookies... it's exhausting. We're talking keeping track of inventory. We're talking door-to-door sales, in tow behind the kids. We're talking hours upon hours of cookie booths at different locations, including set-up and tear-down. Bank deposits. Different bank deposits to cover the council's cut. Organizing the orders and inventory for the other kids in the troop. Helping with their marketing. Stressing over the inventory that I'm pretty sure isn't going to get sold. Stressing over the money that has to add up right. It's worth it, because rarely do I see my children so visibly growing in confidence and quantifiable skills as they do during this intense couple of months of cookie season. And yet... exhausted.

Trashion/Refashion Show. Yes, it IS that time again. In my free time between cookie booths, I've been busting my butt over Syd's design for this year, The Phoenix. I've finished the complete muslin, sourced what I hope will be enough supplies, last night I dyed the bodice--it didn't turn out great, since who knew that khaki overdyed with yellow becomes mostly green?--and I have until Monday to finish designing and sewing the dang thing. 

World Thinking Day. It's like a Girl Scout Geography Fair. I led my troop in our display and presentation this year, and let me just say that the kids' performance of "Farmer Liang Had a Farm," with all the animal names sung in Mandarin, AND a costume for each kid, AND a solo for each animal, was masterful. They're brilliant, the lot of them.

Etsy. I am always happy to have etsy orders, since that's how I pay for birthday presents and craft supplies, among other, more boring, things, but working on them in between cookie business and fashion show designing and planning our China booth? Yep! Exhausting.

So of COURSE with all of this stuff that I HAVE to get done this month, I took an entire day to take the kids to the 2016 Geo Fest at the Indiana State Museum. 

I mean, come on. Fossils! Rocks! Sand! Dirt! It's pretty much a must-do.

To illustrate how off my game I am in the overabundance of activity this month, I didn't take pictures of half of what I want to tell you about. I should, for instance, absolutely have photographed for you the flourescent rocks, on account of they were freaking amazing. A volunteer had a table of them, lit with a black light, of course, and a chart. You'd admire a rock, ask him what it was, and he'd look at his chart and tell you about it. 

Ummm.... I asked him about so many rocks that finally he just gave me the chart and let me look them up for myself.

One of the coolest specimens was a piece of coal with little lines of some kind of impurity running through it. Under the black light, the coal looked blacker than black, but those lines glowed! Later in the day, at the table with the geophysicists, they were showing us specimen after specimen of core samples, and telling us what each thing was--"This one is limestone, and this is a different kind of limestone. Here is silt, but this one is sandstone," etc. One of the geophysicists pointed to one of the samples, said, "This one is coal," and I said, "Ooh, it's got lines of impurities! Do you know if they fluoresce?"

The geophysicists were like, "What?!?" and I was like, "Dude, fluorescence!", and told them all about the guy with the black light on Level 1. As we departed to go learn about groundwater from another table, the geophysicists were making plans to go check him and his coal out.

Have I ever told you that Syd is mortally offended by the atl-atl?

There's a story there, I swear it.

The coolest things about Geo Fest, in my opinion, are the activity tables. On both levels, and in the galleries, are various tables set up with exhibits to explore, crafts to do, little activities or quizzes, and THE BEST PRIZES IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE:

That mastodon bone fragment was a prize. As was the rock that the kids made into necklaces. And some mica at another table.

 You can see one of the tables in the background here, although I actually WAS taking a super nerdy picture of this trilobyte:

And yep, the kids got to keep the microfossils that they discovered and sorted. It was awesome.

Okay, so now I have to tell you about The. Coolest. THING. EVER!!! Some guy had a sandbox up on a rolling cart. Above the sandbox, he'd rigged a Kinect camera and a digital projector. The image projected onto the sandbox was a topographical map of the actual terrain of the sandbox, and as the kids played, moving sand and shoveling and digging, the map image changed in real-time to reflect what the kids were doing!

Oh, and there was also a water table algorithm, so if a kid dug down, the hole would fill with virtual water, and you could hold a fist up as a cloud to make it rain, and water would flow, etc.

It. Was. AWESOME!!!

Will says that she wants to make one of these augmented reality sandboxes for her STEM fair project, and we actually own all of the hardware except for the digital projector, which is something that I've wanted forever, anyway. Stay tuned!

We did some of the actual exhibits in the museum--

--although I was bummed to discover that the rocks and minerals gallery, which I was super excited to steer the kids into after we'd seen some of the Geo Fest stuff, is actually off-exhibit right now for some reconstruction. Dang it!

On the way home from the museum, because I am insane, I had the kids and I scheduled to do a three-hour cookie booth outside a Wal-mart. It was kind of a windy day, so we'd decided not to use the big backdrop that the kids had made, at least, so we only had to deal with unloading and transporting the table and tablecloth and donation boxes and cases of cookies.

We got everything unloaded and moved and started setting up outside the Wal-mart entrance, and it was great. People were so excited, they were trying to buy cookies before we even had anything out. I had a couple at my table, another guy standing in line, the kids racing to finish getting all the boxes set up, when all of a sudden, the wind goes CRAZY. It starts blowing like there's a tornado coming or something, and it flips the cookie table and blows every single thing, cookies and donation boxes and the little prizes that the kids had made for customers, directly into the busy parking lot. The lid falls off of the Operation Cookie Drop donation box, and now bills are flying all over. Both kids start to bolt for the money flying around the parking lot. I scream for them to stop, and they do, but every time a new bill blows by they forget and start to bolt again and I scream at them again. A bunch of total strangers start picking up cookies from the parking lot, with cars weaving around them. I put the table back on its feet, and it immediately blows over again. I let go of it, and it starts to blow into the kids. I grab it again, look right into the face of a horrified total stranger, and just say to her, in a conversational tone, "I don't know what to do."

That woman and her husband help me fold up the table and drag it around the corner of the building, where there's enough of a break from the wind that it will at least stop trying to blow away on its own. Other total strangers bring me boxes of cookies that they've picked up for me, and help me pack them haphazardly back into the grocery carts; we can't set anything down, because if we take our hands off of it, it blows away again. The employee in charge of fetching shopping carts from the parking lot finds a couple of bills and brings them to me, then buys a box of Do-Si-Dos and lets me keep the change after I tell him about more money blowing away underneath a chain-link fence.

We got everything back into the car eventually, then we all climbed in and just sort of sat there, dazed. People are walking past us to and fro into the store, leaning against the wind, their hair blowing wildly. Finally, I said, "Did you notice, Kids? Total disaster struck us and immediately, every single person in sight stopped what they were doing and helped us. We could never have fixed all of that by ourselves. We had all the help that we needed, as much of it as we needed, and we didn't know a single person here."

That's the main lesson that I hope that the children carry with them away from this crazy cookie season. They've learned how to set a goal, how to work as hard as they can to achieve that goal, and how much more work it will take next year to try again to achieve it (despite their best efforts, they're not going to sell 1,000 cookies each this year). They've learned how to market the less-popular cookies. They've learned how to work as a team. Syd has learned how to handle cash transactions. Will has learned how to use the credit card reader.

But more importantly, they've learned that there are people in this world who will ask a Girl Scout what her favorite kind of cookie is, buy that cookie, then hand the box to her to keep. There are people in this world who will tell a kid that they've already bought five boxes of cookies from a neighbor kid, then, after she says to them, "Thank you for supporting Girl Scouts!" (I taught them that!), will turn back around and buy another five boxes of cookies from them, too, just because they're polite. There are people in this world who will ask a Girl Scout a question, stand patiently smiling while she works out her answer, stay there while another child figures out the change, continue to stay while a third kid is reminded of what to say at the end of a transaction and then still leave with a smile, several minutes later. There are people in this world who will buy cookies for soldiers whom they'll never meet.

And there are especially people in this world, a lot of people, who will, when walking into a busy store on a busy afternoon after a long day at work, see the cookie booth of a woman and two Girl Scouts practically explode in the wind, stuff fly everywhere, and will pick up all that stuff in a parking lot, around the wheels of cars, and bring it right back to her. Including cookies. Including money.

I hope that I'm that kind of person. I hope that my kids will grow up to be that kind of person, too.

The Catalytic Decomposition of Hydrogen Peroxide--Bust and Boom!

Please don't call it elephant's toothpaste.

The kids have been studying atoms and how they combine into molecules, and exploring chemical reactions is an excellent way to expand upon and enrich that study. Chemical reactions take molecules and make them into different molecules or break them down into atoms, and you can see that microscopic process with your very own eyes!

Science is amazing, isn't it?

One of the most accessible chemical reactions with a great wow factor is the catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide. It's become common to refer to this demonstration as "elephant's toothpaste," and I have to admit that I just don't get that. Yes, it's a cute name. No, it doesn't relate to anything about the process or the science behind it. Yes, kids like cute names. No, it doesn't do kids any good to expose them to the demonstration without any explanation, as if it's simply a fun magic trick. SCIENCE is the magic here, my Friends! Let your kids know that this is SCIENCE!

*steps down off soapbox*

Ahem... anyway, there are several different ways to force the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide, but as we learned for ourselves, some are less user-friendly than others.

We first tried forcing the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide using yeast as a catalyst:

It was a total bust. I doubt that it worked any more quickly than simply exposing the hydrogen peroxide to the sun would. We played around with it, had to leave for an activity, came back hours later, and were like, "Oh, it finally foamed up... yay."

Another day, we tried the demonstration again with proper supplies, and it worked like a dream.

Instead of jacking around with household supplies, I bought the actual proper ingredients, both 20-volume hydrogen peroxide and 40-volume hydrogen peroxide (for an interesting comparison) and potassium iodide.

I bought the powdered form of potassium iodide, because it's simple to make it into a saturated solution--just 1 gram of potassium iodide powder in 1 ml of water, shaken well:

You also need some sort of wide-bodied container with a small opening. When we tried this demonstration outside, we used a plastic soda bottle, hoping for an explosive exit by the oxygen, but on this day, the temperature was in the teens, and I instead chose an Erlenmeyer flask for our indoors demo. 

For the first demonstration, I poured 1/8 cup of hydrogen peroxide into the Erlenmeyer flask, then added the saturated solution of potassium iodide. The result is not, like, amazingly exciting, but does give you a clear view of the oxygen atoms being released from the hydrogen peroxide molecules:

Don't forget to touch the outside of the flask while you're observing the chemical reaction. This is an exothermic reaction, so you'll feel the warmth! 

The chemical reaction becomes more exciting when you add something for the oxygen molecules to cling to as they escape. A big squirt of dishwashing detergent should do nicely:



One of the especially fun things about this demonstration, as I'm sure you can see, is that the byproduct is entirely heat, oxygen, and bubbles. It's perfectly safe to play with:

This is the face that a kid should make when doing science!

This is also a great time to review the structure of molecules. We use this Zometools Molecular Mania kit:

With it, the kids modeled both hydrogen peroxide and water. See that extra oxygen atom in the hydrogen peroxide model? That's what we were playing with!

Finally, I asked the children to repeat the demonstration on their own. Here's Will making her saturated solution of potassium iodide:

Success!

This was one seriously fun demonstration, and I can't imagine a better way to make that information on atoms, molecules, and chemical reactions stick.

Just wait until we get to do this again outside! And yes, when I promised the kids that we could make it into a "bomb," I meant it.

An Ode to Gracie

Will deeply desires a dog of her own, and we're hoping to make that happen this summer, but this particular spoiled grey tabby of ours is pretty much Sydney's best friend and soulmate:

She is to be found wherever the children are, often sleeping inconveniently exactly where you'd rather be, but under Syd's dictate, you are not permitted to disturb her, lest that make her uncomfy:

In warm weather, she insists upon being outside with the children, and will even follow us on hikes: 

When the children go outside to play in poor weather, however, Gracie stands at the window and watches them, meowing plaintively. It's pretty pathetic.

Mostly, however, you'll find her somewhere like this:

And yes, she will let Syd dress her up. Here, she's serving as the mascot for Syd's online Girl Scout cookie shop (which you should ask me for the link for, so that you can buy some cookies from her. She takes credit cards! And ships across the US!):

And, yes, she even has her own theme song:

We WILL launch our Hunt for the Best Dog Ever this summer, because I promised the kid, and it's something that she wants very much, and frankly, it's probably something that she needs very much, as well, but I'm nervous about it on several fronts. Will we find a dog that won't eat the chickens? Will we successfully train it not to pee in the house? Will its existence be a giant pain in the ass?

But also... will it, could it, how could it ever possibly be as perfect, as deeply loved, as integral a part of our family as our beloved Spots and Gracie are?

Although I do look forward to one day hearing Will make up and sing a theme song to her dog...

An Ode to Coloring

That's another thing that the kids have been doing for hours lately! Syd especially, but also often Will, seem deeply content to spend much of an entire day simply listening to audiobooks and coloring. When they were small, I despised coloring books, as I felt that they deprived the children of their creativity, and the kids do often make their own drawings--

--but I have since come to suspect, as has most of the world, if the rise in popularity of adult coloring books can be trusted, that there is something particularly satisfying, in an almost meditative way, about just... coloring.

And that's why we often spend our time exactly here, doing exactly this:

I tend to sneakily saturate our coloring and listening with educational selections. Fortunately, the audio version of Joy Hakim's The History of Us is quite well done, so much so that Syd, my main listener/colorer, will usually choose to keep feeding discs into the stereo in order to listen to the entire book, if I start her off with it. She also just finished listening to Harriet the Spy on CD, and right this second, actually, is sitting in the playroom windowseat, petting the cat, and listening to the Land of Stories series on Playaways.

Note: I will tolerate her telling me the entire plot of Land of Stories, even though that probably takes longer than it would just to listen to them, but I require her to listen to Land of Stories on headphones, because I. Cannot. STAND. THEM!!!!!!!!!

Ahem...

Syd is as voracious a consumer of audiobooks as Will is of print books, so I should probably stop right here and share with admit to you all of the audiobooks that we currently have checked out from the library for her:

  

Yes, that list is for real. Mind you, some of those titles are ones that she chose for herself, and some are titles that I'm strewing for her to find. And that doesn't count the audiobooks that I have for myself, of course--something dry on Jamestown and an alternate history of the American Revolution. Super fun, right?

The kids are also quite tolerant of my sneaky stacking of their coloring book collection with educational titles. Here's their shelf of coloring and puzzle books:

And yep, 99.9% of those are educational. My favorite publishers are Dover, Bellerophon, and Peterson, and if I ever find a clean copy of one of those books at a second-hand shop--you'd be surprised how often that happens!--I will buy it, no matter its subject. Dover and Bellerophon are especially nice, since they have coloring books on fictional themes, but with a factual background. For instance, Will is super into dragons, and still colors from this Dover coloring book on dragons that I bought her in 2012 (Pro tip: I make my kids photocopy the page that they want to color. They can choose regular paper or cardstock, but they color that copy, leaving the coloring book clean for unlimited use!). It's got a different picture of a dragon on every page, WITH text that describes that dragon's place in mythology or culture. It's dragons AND learning! This Bellerophon coloring book of unicorns (which Amazon tells me that I bought on the same day as I bought the dragons one) is formatted identically.

Will also really likes the Color Yourself Smart book of dinosaurs, although unfortunately none of the other titles in that series are anywhere near that exciting. Get some more books on animals, medieval history, and astronomy, Color Yourself Smart!

Beyond the purely educational coloring books, the kids and I are also drawn to the often abstract, often VERY highly detailed "adult" coloring books. The kids' grandmothers have given them several of the Creative Haven coloring books, and I think that Syd and I are both working on one here:

 Oh, and I JUST finished this page from the Color Me Cluttered coloring book (which I actually received for free from a publicist--how fun is that, getting supplied with coloring books just for being me?):

I've actually got a few coloring pages that I'm working on. I tend to sit down to join the kids with whatever they're doing, so if they're coloring with markers, I work on my paisley page--

--and if they're working with colored pencils, I have my Harry Potter coloring book that I just started: 

I started it on the road, as it was a Christmas gift from my aunt and I started coloring in it about ten minutes after she gave it to me. That's why I'm coloring this page IN the book. From now on, I'll copy the page that I want to color, just like everyone else.

Of course, one mustn't forget the internet as a source of coloring material. Syd is a BIG fan of doing a Google image search for coloring pages, because that's just about the only way that the poor little lamb can color her pop culture loves, whether it's superheroes or Barbie or My Little Pony. Will sometimes jumps in for more dragon coloring pages, but mostly it's Syd and a million different versions of Pinkie Pie's Cupcake Party or whatever.

Okay, enough about coloring. While Syd is listening to audiobooks and Will is lying on the floor reading, I need to go make a database of Girl Scout cookie booth sign-ups, organize cookie deliveries for this afternoon, wash Syd's ballet leotard, find a base pattern for her fashion show garment, start on a massive birthday candle order that I've been procrastinating on for a solid week now, steam mop the kitchen floor, and start an altered book page greeting card tute for Crafting a Green World.

I said that the kids would have a restful week this week, NOT me.

An Ode to Geomags

Note: No, there are no weekly work plans this week! Near the end of last week, I began to suspect that in my own desire to stay busy to distract myself from my grief over Pappa, I've been over-scheduling the children, as well. I mean, I certainly have less time to feel sad when there's a full day of schoolwork every day AND an hours-long field trip AND a playdate AND a class or extracurricular to drive to AND some time spent shilling for cookie orders on the way there or back.

And the children, my good sports, did actually manage to get most of their schoolwork done, even so, but I began to see them gently reacting to my over-planning in probably the best way that a child can: with play. I'd go to tell them that it was time to begin schoolwork for the day, to find one or both deeply immersed in their toys, and I'd back off. Hours later, there they'd still be, happily playing. You know that I rarely disturb a focused child, so it was certainly the most efficient and least confrontational way for them to get more time for themselves.

We're going to keep that up this week, I think. I'm still going to require the kids to do their math every day, and work on their memory work (Mandarin started again last week!), and I have a selection of odd little projects--another Nature documentary that I've been wanting them to watch, thank-you letters for Christmas presents, extension recipes from Your Kids: Cooking, homemade Valentines for an exchange next week, etc.--of which I'll ask the children to choose one and I'll choose one for them each day, and, of course, there are still plenty of extracurriculars and loads of Girl Scout cookie selling, but ideally, this project-focused week will give us a chance to rest, reset, and refocus on next week.

One of the toys that was played with the most last week was the Geomags. I think that I've written about these before, and that's because they're perennial favorites, one of the few toys that have been loved right out of the box and universally for years.

They're pricey as hell, but totally worth it for us, since they're also played with so well. Every now and then, I'll add to the kids' collection for some holiday or other--the younger kid, for instance, received the pink Geomags set one Christmas, and I think another Christmas brought them the professional set. Here's basically what we have so far:



Several weeks ago, the kids became interested in using the Geomags to build anti-gravity and "perpetual motion" machines, inspired in great part by this anti-gravity spinner and this perpetual motion machine. The younger kid worked on building a triangular prism that would sit suspended inside this cube construction--

--while the older kid actually got her anti-gravity spinner to work!

The kids are both also really interested in building pyramids--when we first got these Geomags, and for years afterwards, they'd build a simple pyramid that they could transform into a "scooter dog," and they'd make it and then play pretend games with it. I haven't seen scooter dog in a long time, but I have seen several of these lying around:

Another interesting thing that I've noticed lately is the younger kid's desire to sort the metal marbles on top of the colored panels. I'm not sure what she's exploring with this, but she does it over and over, so something fascinating must be going on with it in her brain:

For the kids' next birthdays, I'm pretty sure that I'll be giving at least one of them a new Geomag set, as I've been noticing that the kids have sometimes been using ALL of the Geomags in their constructions. Here are my top contenders:

Right now, coloring books are also on the birthday wish-lists, as right this second, finished with two brief playdates with friends (while their moms and I sorted Girl Scout cookies) and our volunteer gig, procrastinating on her math, and about to be asked to help me make dinner, the younger kid is once again sitting at the table, listening to Harriet the Spy on audiobook and coloring.

She's just as busy as she needs to be.