Hello, trees

Fiona and I have been visiting the trees in the forest that surrounds our home recently, appreciating them anew as they emerge from the snow and prepare for a new season of growth.

Yesterday we checked out the red cedar bark, which we will use for basket weaving. Years ago the kids did a workshop with this lovely local lady, and while they're a lot of work, the tiny baskets we have since made have been very striking and rewarding. It's still too early in the season for it to come away easily in long strips, but we're looking forward to harvesting some in May. We then dug up some red cedar roots, to decide how useful they'd be for embellishing our baskets. I had read that they make great sewing material, but had never taken the suggestion seriously. They really are amazing. The slenderest ones are strong, pliable and lovely to look at, and they dry and increase in strength very quickly once harvested.

We collected armloads of white pine cones to use a fire-starter next winter.

And then we made our acquaintance again with the birch trees. We tapped a couple of birch trees years ago, but our sap collection set-up wasn't ideal and we didn't get enough sap to make a proper syrup. Because birch sap is about five times less sugary than maple sap, you need a heck of a lot of it!

Sometime in the intervening years I managed to purchase four spiles and today we picked up some clear 1/2" tubing at the local hardware store. All it took was a quick bit of work with the portable drill and a couple of taps with the mallet the trees began spilling their sap out for us with eagerness. We plugged a couple of tubes into each of two glass carboys and within an hour or two had a couple of gallons of sap.

I imagine it will be incredibly time- and energy-consuming to boil the stuff down, but I'm happy to do it just once, to experience the process and the taste of the syrup.

Birch sap is sterile and contains trace amounts of minerals, xylitol and various other good things. It's actually a great source of safe drinking water. Not that we don't already have safe drinking water, but hey, when civilization crumbles, this might be a useful piece of knowledge.

TOPScience

Just over a month ago Fiona received her favourite Festivus gift. I bought her a set of four TOPS Chemistry units, complete with the equipment and supplies kits that made them completely self-contained and drop-dead simple to implement in the kitchen. While I'm by nature a scrounger and a make-do-er, I've recognized that the little details involved in, say, finding a little household iodine solution are often time-consuming and sometimes delay the implementation of whatever activity someone wants to do. The learning momentum can easily collapse when there are multiple delays.

So we splurged and got the little kits containing ziplocs of common chemicals, test tubes and pipettes. We had some of that stuff, but the package deal was so simple.

We're both really impressed with the task-oriented teaching in the units. Fiona has just about finished the first of the four units, the one on chemical analysis. It's described as being suitable for Grades 5-10, and though it's perfect for Fiona, I think it would be a pretty light-weight program for a high schooler. Still, it's far more in-depth and sensibly, workably hands-on than similar programs I've seen.

Pictured above is her red-cabbage-water indicator at various pHs. From left to right: pH=3 (with vinegar), pH=6 (with a single drop of vinegar) pH=6.5 (straight cabbage water), pH=9 (with kitchen cleanser) and pH=13 (with lye).

TOPScience can be ordered here.

Soap and teenagers

The soap has cured! We've wrapped it up in salvaged tissue paper and ribbon, to keep it protected until use by us or others. While the lavender buds turned a less-than-fetching brown in the alkaline environment, the basic marbled green of the soap is nice to look at, and the mixture of lavender and rosemary scent is just right.

The power was out most of today and this is one of the things Fiona and I did to fill the time.

Today we also enjoyed having three teenagers in the family for the first time.  Sophie has joined Noah and Erin on the far side of twelve. Plans for birthday dinner and coconut cream pie were almost foiled by the power failure, but the electricity came on just in time for us to squeeze the cooking in.

I would wager that Sophie has felt thirteen for a while now. She joined Corazón (nominally for 13 through 25-year-olds) in September. She's been one of the youngest students enrolled in the local public high school this fall, through school-wide multi-day field trips and multi-grade workshops. Her social affinities have always tended to run a little 'old.' And she's a well-grounded, mature kid, with a solid sense of what's right for her and of what she likes.

Now it's official. She's a teenager. As always any nostalgia I might feel for the little-kid days is far outweighed by the excitement and pride I feel watching my children grow into such interesting and capable young people, ready for adventure, quirky as heck but as loveable than ever.

Chemistry around here

Lye + water + oil = soap

Fiona would like to be a chemist, or so she thinks. Until we get to the chemistry section in her science course, we're having fun little forays into the world of household chemistry.

We had fun making soap a couple of weeks ago. We used a combination of sweet almond oil, olive oil and coconut oil, and a great on-line lye calculator. We weighed things out with our digital kitchen scale (love that thing!) and got a mixture that was accurate and reliable. Much better than the guess-work I'd been used to from my previous soap-making forays.

We added some rosemary and lavender, and essential oils of each, plus a little green soap dye. It smells lovely and we are patiently waiting for it to cure whilst testing out little scraps from time to time. It lathers beautifully.

Sugar syrup + baking soda = foam

Today we made sponge toffee. I hadn't done this in years and had mistakenly thought it was a acid-base reaction with the baking soda which was responsible for all the bubbles. In fact the baking soda remains inert and simply acts as an nidus for bubble formation in the boiling syrup. There's no acid involved at all: just the thermal decomposition of sodium bicarbonate.

We made our sponge toffee with a bit of butter rum flavouring left over from Sophie's summer hard candy business and it tastes fabulous. Our digital infrared thermometer made easy work of the syrup boiling. Again, good tools make such a difference!

Sponge Toffee


2 1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cup corn syrup
90 ml water
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1/2 tsp. butter rum flavour (optional)
2 tsp. sifted baking soda

Line a 9x13" pan with foil and brush foil with oil or butter. Mix sugar, corn syrup and water in a large heavy saucepan. Bring gradually to a boil. Cover with tight lid for 5 minutes to dissolve any sugar crystals that may be adhering to the sides of the saucepan. Remove lid and continue boiling, checking temperature frequently. Once syrup has reached 300ºF, remove from heat. Stir in flavouring(s). Whisk in baking soda and quickly pour into prepared pan. Allow to cool to room temperature. Remove foil and break apart, consuming ad lib.

Mobile

Last winter Fiona and I had a lot of fun making styrofoam and paper maché replicas of the planets. We had thought we would hang them up on display, but before we got around to doing so we put them on the mantel where they began to collect dust and disappear from our awareness.

Finally last night we got to work making a mobile out of them. We used floral wire and cotton string, some needle-nose pliers and some physics to get everything balanced nicely.

It took a lot of work, but we are very pleased with the result.

Milky swirls

Fiona is enjoying learning how to use iMovie and iStopMotion. We made this one together. A couple of her other projects are on her blog.

Building a gaming machine

Noah has always been the heaviest computer user amongst or kids. He's a self-made geek who has become a whiz at tinkering with software. Recently he's been straying into the realm of hardware, trouble-shooting connections and adding secondary drives.

But all the tweaking and upgrading of a five-year-old heavily-used computer hasn't been quite enough. The games the kids like to play demand high-end processing, lots of hard drive space and excellent graphics capabilities. The old motherboard and operating system weren't really up to the task, the hard drive had tanked, the computer was officially non-functional, and the patchwork approach of repairing and upgrading no longer seemed like it was the most sensible route. It was time for a new machine.

Noah spent a lot of time researching products, compatibility and pricing. Because some components could be salvaged from the old computer, he figured it would be most economical (and most fun) to build a machine himself. He managed to cobble together the components for a pretty awesome gaming machine for under a thousand bucks Canadian. And this morning the bits arrived. He and Chuck set to work putting it together. As I type he has the assembled tower whirring away installing Windows 7, flashing all its funky multi-coloured LEDs.

Pear production

We're into day three of pear processing here. All six trays of the dehydrator have been loaded up yet again.

We pulled out our copy of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" by Harold McGee to figure out how to handle the ripening. Ninety-five per cent of our pears are still not ripe, which is a blessing. If we can continue to ripen a steady trickle of 4 or 5 pounds a day, they'll be easy to deal with. For now we have a bag at room temperature with a few ripe ones to encourage "climacteric ripening" courtesy of ethylene gas. We also have two bags at cellar temperature and the remainder outside in a chest cooler which the bears have so far not discovered. This is working well so far.

It's physics

Really. It is not four children, a tree fort, a couple of climbing harnesses, some ropes and a lot of only-marginally safe crazed swinging, leaping and 'flying'. It is not an accident waiting to happen. It is not inadequate parental limit-setting.

No, it's pulleys, pendulums, mass, density, period, acceleration, distance, speed and moment of inertia.

It's physics. Really.

Creating explosives

Noah has been creating explosive compounds during readaloud time. Not real ones -- just the models. We're reading from "Napoleon's Buttons: 17 Molecules that Changed History" and are into the chapter on nitro compounds. Schonbein's wife's exploding apron ('guncotton') was a great segué into this chapter.

There are lots of chemical structures drawn in the book, so while I'm reading the text, we'll be building the molecules in questions out of our MolyMod kit. It was fun to look at glucose transforming itself from a linear to a cyclic arrangement, and to imagine how big 100 million such rings would be in a cellulose molecule.

I have a thing for colour. Not in the artistic sense -- in the symbolic sense. I love cuisenaire rods because the association of colour, length and mathematical value works so well for me. And I love how striking the two-reds-and-a-blue nitro group combination is in the MolyMod kit. We'd made lots of molecules in the past, but focusing on the nitro group through our reading and its distinctive colourful representation in the kit has really made this information stick for the kids.

Chemistry is poking it's many-faceted face out of a variety of corners around here lately. For some strange reason some of my children have decided to memorize as much of the periodic table
as they can. Erin, who is a visual/textual learner, decided to write the elements out in order. From memory for the first 50 or 70, and then cribbing off the table.

There's something funny about a four-year-old coming up to you with a big grin and saying "Magnesium is 12 and Aluminum is 13."

As with everything, even the apparently mundane task of memorizing the periodic table turns into hilarity and storytelling with my kids. Elements quickly become associated with people whose ages match their atomic number. Jokes and stories evolve. Grandma E. is radon! People hate her because she lurks in their basements and does unhealthy things.

Life's never dull.

Biology 101

Normally a post I write entitled Biology 101 would be about chasing frogs, or watching the garden grow, or planting trees or growing a sourdough culture. But this time it really is about a college-level introductory biology course. Actually it's about the texbook designed for such a course.

Sophie first expressed an interest in biology about a year ago. She was no doubt influenced by Noah's interest in chemistry. Sophie got quite excited by his foray into focused, though informal, study of a particular scientific area. After Noah got started on the RealScience4Kids Chemistry I program, she carved out her own area of interest in Biology. Perhaps she mostly liked the shinyness of the hardcover textbook, and the chance to do some semi-structured reading and lab activities with me. In any event, she talked me into buying the Biology I program, and enjoyed it a lot. We found the latter third of the program pretty lackluster, as it was mostly centred around natural science activities we'd done several times in the past (raising tadpoles, observing caterpillar metamorphosis, etc.), but she definitely enjoyed the more academic early part of the program with its emphasis on taxonomy and subcellular structure. And our reading of Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and biographies and historical fiction centred around biology has led her to a deeper understanding and a thirst for resources at a more complex level.

When we had extra SelfDesign Learning Allowance money to use up, Sophie again voiced a desire for a more comprehensive and complex biology reference book. My approach with the SelfDesign money has been to either buy items with immediate practical use for a specific child (eg. bicycle, piano lessons, art materials) or to purchase more academically-focused items with a likelihood of broad future appeal to multiple children, like the Teaching Textbook math programs. With this latter approach in mind I went hunting for a good biology reference book. Eventually I settled on Neil Campbell's "Biology: Concepts and Connections," intended to accompany a high school AP or introductory university biology course.

This publication is far more than a textbook; it's a course too. It comes with a CD-ROM and access code providing on-line MP3 lectures, videos, virtual labs, interactive investigations, self-evaluation quizzes, games, images and tutorials. The entire book can be accessed as an eBook, but the hard copy itself is well-written and beautifully laid out and worth the price in and of itself. If one's aim is to learn the material, I cannot see why it would make sense to spend several hundred dollars on a college course and then also go out and buy a $150 textbook. With textbooks like this, who needs a prof!?

I highly doubt Sophie will choose to work systematically through what is in effect a college Biology 101 course. But so far she's having great fun browsing through the book and taking the computer-based quizzes. She seems to have learned a heck of a lot from our casual reading and discussions over the past year. What kind of 8-year-old sees a question like this

Which of the following are required for natural selection to occur?

1. heritable variability
   
2. differential survival
3. small population size
4. heritable variability and differential survival
5. heritable variability, differential survival and small population size

and clicks on 4 with scarcely a hesitation?

I think this publication will be useful in many ways over the years.

Microscopes for kids

We've had two optical microscopes and a hand-held magnifier available to the kids. A small Bausch & Lomb (i.e. high quality optics) 'scope we got off eBay for about $30, list price around $90, was the first purchase. It had a single 50X objective and the quality of the image was good. But it was small and fiddly to focus and the illumination was limited to indirect lighting. Plus we found that only our eldest could actually squint down the barrel and see anything. Our younger two (under 7 at the time) just couldn't reliably see through the barrel. It takes a fair bit of concentration and mental ability to train your eyes to see down a single barrel. They tried the hand-covering-other-eye trick (since they couldn't wink) but that didn't seem to help much, and it just left them unbalanced as they leaned over the scope, covered one eye and tried to adjust the focus with the other hand. The whole endeavour was just exhausting for them and frustrating.

We have brought home the medical clinic scope on a number of occasions. It's a professional quality scope with high magnification (suitable for micro-organisms like bacteria and yeasts) and an oil-immersion lens. Large, sturdy, great lighting. Our eldest saw a few interesting things with it, but the younger kids had the same "squinting down a tiny hole" challenges. Sometimes Noah (then 6) thought he could see something. Sophie (then 4) never did. The depth of field at high magnifications is negligible, so slide preparation has to be done properly (thin samples, maybe using a microtome, slide and cover slip, etc. or else just buying and using prepared slides). What happened was that the adult would spend 20 minutes in slide preparation, slide-gazing and fine-focusing, and then would get the kids to peek in and see what we'd found. It definitely didn't maintain child-led enthusiasm!

We gave up on the medical scope (will use it again when the kids are older), packed away the little Bausch & Lomb and I bought an inexpensive hand-held magnifier (15X magnification, I believe) and they seemed to like that more. With that lower magnification it had a large depth of focus and it could be brought to the eye, rather than vice versa, so my then-6yo was able to use it reasonably well. Also, at low magnification, things bore more resemblance to their unmagnified images, and that somehow made the viewing "realer" and more exciting for the kids.

I still had microscope dreams for the kids, so I did a lot of reading about kids & scopes. I decided that if we could afford to be a microscope at some point, it would probably make the most sense to buy a high-quality binocular dissecting microscope (i.e. relatively low magnification, two barrels to look down for relaxed viewing, large depth of field, easy-to-use focusing knobs). But these 'scopes are expensive. So we waited.

Then I stumbled across reviews and images from the Digital Blue. Debbie posted some of her kids' images for me on a message board. I was really impressed. So we used Grandma's Christmas-and-birthday-money-for-the-year to order one. We bought a slightly older version on sale and got it for about $50 (the best price I've seen lately is about $150). We're really happy with it.

It has low to medium magnification (10X, 60X and 200X). The barrel can be removed so that, like a hand-held magnifier, it can be used to examine things you can't easily fit on the stage -- fingerprints, eyeballs, the winding on the strings of a violin, the surface of a rock, etc.. There is none of the exhausting squinting down the barrel -- you're looking at an image as big as your computer screen. At low magnification the depth of field is vast and focusing is dead easy. Medium magnification the kids can use easily with a bit of practice. "High" (i.e. 200X) magnification focusing is of course fussy (that's just the nature of the physics) and it is difficult to get sharp images without doing real glass-and-coverslip slide preparation, but it is possible with patience. Using the scope is no longer a solitary taking-turns endeavour ... three or four kids +/- adults can watch in real time as something leaps into focus. They can point on the screen ("what's that?" or "move over this way"). The image is not inverted as in a regular scope, so moving around the image is easy and intuitive. We can capture images to save and share (later, with daddy, or with a friend, or to insert in another document like a website or newsletter). We can save video clips of little critters in motion. When you can retrieve and re-examine images, everything stays more real and present in your memory.

The microscope software installed beautifully in a minute or two with no hitches in both WindowsXP and W98. The microscope has proved sturdy enough for our use. I don't worry about supervising, and sometimes the barrel gets treated a little roughly -- no problems so far. It continues to interest the kids. While is does run through the computer, unless you are capturing and exporting images, you don't have the sense while you're using it that you're "using the computer". All the activity is at the microscope end, with the computer screen simply being a real-time video feed of what the scope is seeing. In other words, your hands can stay totally on the microscope and your specimens, and you don't need to fuss with the mouse or keyboard except for, say, adjusting lighting off the "auto" setting, or viewing previously-captured images. Really I can't say enough great things about this microscope and its developmental suitability for kids.

The above post was written 18 months ago and I stand by everything I wrote then. Our microscope is still functioning well. The QX3 we own has now been replaced on the market by the nearly-identical QX5. Oh, and in case you're wondering, that's a J-cloth in the image above, at 60X magnification.

Planet Earth

I was looking for ways to spend the Learning Allowance the kids are afforded by the homeschooling program they're enrolled in. Because we don't live in a TV universe, I hadn't heard of BBC's Planet Earth series until I stumbled onto it at Amazon.ca. We love all the David Attenborough nature documentaries and have watched lots of them over the years thanks to our Zip.ca subscription. But we'd just given up our Zip subscription for the year (we re-register every October, through until April), and Planet Earth looked like something we'd enjoy owning and watching repeatedly. So I ordered it.

What a phenomenal series! Even Erin, who doesn't take much interest in nature documentaries as a rule, is interested in this one. Each of the eleven segments examines a different biome -- caves, shallow seas, jungles, grasslands, mountains, polar regions and so on. The photography is stunning. For many of the most spectacular sequences they've used a camera affixed to the bottom of a helicopter, one with immense telescopic capacity, so that the helicopter can fly 1000 metres above an individual animal, outside the animal's awareness, and the camera can make you feel like you're looking over its shoulder. There are wonderful panoramic and satellite images, clever use of pans and zooms and time-lapse sequences -- even in combination. What this series does with unsurpassed skill is to put magnificent animals in the context of magnificent landscapes.

I was sad to see that Sigourney Weaver had done the narration for the American release of this series and tried to over-ride the region settings on our DVD player in the hope that we could get it to play UK DVDs, and then order the Attenborough version. I couldn't hack the regional settings though, and resigned myself to Sigourney Weaver. So I was delighted to discover, when our discs arrived, that it's only the Discovery Channel release that uses Weaver -- the standard release, including our copy, has Attenborough.

Chicks

Our chicks have arrived! We ordered 16 but are playing host to another 21 for some friends of ours for a few weeks. Last night we got a phone call from the post office in Castlegar saying that our cheepers were there and would be arriving at our local post office this morning. This morning, true to form, the local post office called on the dot of 8 a.m. to say "your babies are here -- they're cute for about five minutes, but the noise starts to drive us nuts after that, so come and get 'em!" The kids, wonder of wonders, were awake and ready to go. So we drove down and picked them up, and dumpster-dived on the way home to get enough big pieces of cardboard to create a temporary indoor brooder in the basement.

Our new chicken shed is ready, attached as a lean-to to an existing shed that formerly served in part as the chicken shed. The "old chicken shed" has been claimed by the wanna-be blacksmith of the family as a smithy. The new chicken lean-to is awesome and will be great once our cheepers are ready for slightly cooler temperatures.

In the past we've had homogenous flocks of either Isa-Browns or Barred Rocks. This year we've purchased a mixed flock. Six are Red Rock Cross hens, brown egg layers. Right now they're all black, but they'll end up black and with reddish chests. Six are Barred Rocks. These are unsexed, so some will no doubt grow into roosters. They will grow into lovely barred black and white birds and the hens are reliable brown egg layers as well. These chicks are black with white spots on their heads. We also splurged and bought three 'heritage breed' chicks, a breed called "Ameraucana." We may end up with three hens, or three roosters, but we're hoping for at least one of each sex, because we are considering keeping a rooster and hatching some eggs next spring. These birds lay very large eggs that are sky blue to turquoise in colour. Noah is holding one of the Ameraucanas in the photo above. We ordered from Rochester Hatchery in Alberta. Their on-line catalogue has pictures of all the breeds.

All the breeds we've ordered are what are called "dual-purpose birds" meaning that you can eat the meat of the cockerels, or get good egg production from the hens. While we don't eat meat, our friends are happy to take our cockerels and use them once, at 18 weeks or so, they've declared themselves visually as males. I like dual-purpose birds, rather than strictly layer breeds. They seem a little "closer to nature" to me, and are hardier, especially through the winter and a little more assertive with smallish predators like weasels. They also grow very quickly over the first 16-18 weeks of life. It is very fun to watch cute babies turn into gangly adolescents and then feather out as beautiful, substantial adults just in the course of a season.

The kids are excitedly checking the brooder temperature, feed and water levels about every half hour. I'm sure the novelty will wear off to some extent, but I hope they stay interested and intent on caring for the chickens over the weeks and months that follow. Gathering eggs should be much more interesting with the blue-green ones in the mix. Keep your fingers crossed for at least one Ameraucana hen.

I love having hens at home. It's one small project that helps connect us, and the food on our table, to its source. We can be fully in charge of how our eggs are produced, the conditions our hens live in, and the impact our egg production has on the earth. We've watched a lot of documentaries lately on environmental issues, the politics and economics of food, the organic and whole-foods movement. This new flock of birds fits in really well with all this interest and energy.

Playground physics

Science Club will be wrapping up for the year soon, as we're moving into GRUBS and soccer season. This week we decided to head to the playground and have a low-key time doing some exploratory physics with the playground equipment, our bodies and a few simple props. First we rolled a damp tennis ball against a wall and traced its soggy path on the pavement with chalk. Lo and behold, the angle of incidence equalled the angle of reflection. Next we topped a basketball with a tennis ball, courtesy of a little collar of masking tape, and dropped the two together. The basketball bounced and transfered much of its kinetic energy to the tennis ball in the midst of its bounce and wow, did it ever fly!

Next we explored the 15-second swing. We used a stopwatch to time how long it took Fiona to do five gentle swings. Fifteen seconds. How about someone heavier? Some of the kids thought heavier kids would complete five swings faster. Nope, fifteen seconds. How about someone lighter? Fifteen seconds. How about someone doing really energetic swings in a large arc? Fifteen seconds. No matter what we did, it was a fifteen-second swing. Amazing, no? You'd almost think that the constancy of that swing would be a good way to keep time. Hey! A grandfather clock... This made sense to all the kids.

Finally we shortened the chains with a couple of spring clips. Voilà, thirteen-second swing.

After that we went to the merry-go-round. Are these contraptions a thing of the past in most places? They sure seem delightfully dangerous compared to most of the stuff that is in kids' playgrounds these days. We built an accelerometer (white board, thumb tack, string, key and an arbitrary scale) and tried to see how much acceleration we could produce. We maxed out at 2 3/4, until we got all the kids to move into the centre. Now we were able to generate almost 4 acceleros. We talked about inertia, and the way the distance of a mass from the axis of rotation affects its rotational inertia. We got the merry-go-round spinning as fast as we could with the children near its edges. On command they all moved to the centre. Wow, it sure sped up. Unfortunately the kids who sort of forgot to hold on firmly were thrown (literally) by the sudden increase in acceleration. Two Barker kids were flung off, neatly (though somewhat traumatically) demonstrating linear momentum.

Finally, we tried the waiter-on-a-merry-go-round trick. Hold a cup of water on a tray (or in our case, a plastic IKEA plate), balancing it while the merry-go-round is spinning very quickly. You can't see it clearly in the photo above, but the surface of the water in Noah's cup really is parallel to the plate. Very cool!

Destruction and discovery

Inspired by Karen's LightingtheFires blog entry, Science Club this week was a big "taking apart electronics" fest. Altogether the following revealed their innards to the kids over the course of the afternoon:

1. A CB radio
2. A CD player / radio
3. An inkjet printer
4. An iron
5. A Sony tape deck
6. An old clock radio
7. A cordless mouse
8. A computer drawing tablet

The kids were entranced by the wheel-and-string pulley system for changing the tuner frequency on the clock radio and by the old-fashioned numerical wheel mechanism for displaying the time digitally without LCD or LED diodes. They harvested motors and speakers and tested capacitors, battled with tamper-proof screws, resorting to hammers if necessary, clipped wires, rattled, tapped and whacked things for interesting sounds, pulled and pried and examined tiny components with magnifying lenses.

At the end we had a lot of components, and decided to turn our imaginations loose on creating artwork from the bits. Noah managed to get the steam button mechanism from the iron to pump some air. Fiona created a 'sailboat' from odd bits of componentry, plastic and metal. There were dragonflies and weird four-legged critters. Erin and M. used all the circuit boards they could find to create a miniature futuristic cityscape, with the large capacitors and other plastic switches and the like forming skyscrapers, a capacitor suburban neighbourhood, open market squares, hundreds of tiny roadways, some odd-looking parkland and airline flyby routes designated by the colourful copper wire still attached and spidering over the whole array.

It was an enjoyable, though somewhat messy, afternoon.

Back to GRUB-bing

The Science Club kids (a.k.a. the homeschooled core of the GRUBS club) got busy planting for spring today. We planted five flats of seedlings with great gusto.

Oddly enough Fiona was most interested in planting sweet peppers; she refuses to eat them, so I can't imagine what possessed her to fixate on planting them. I think she really liked the photo on the seed packet. Noah and his friend B. planted a flat full of quirky choices like different varieties of chili peppers. Sophie and her friend A. planted lots of herbs, marigolds, tomatoes and peppers.

We are lucky enough to have an excellent relationship with the local school. The science room of the school has a huge solarium window, complete with grow lights on a timer, that is almost never used, so the GRUBS, as an inclusive club that welcomes all interested families with children, are able to make use of the space for our seedlings. They'll be installed there after March Break and will, we hope, merrily grow away until sometime around our last frost date in the 3rd week of May.

GRUBS is organizing the second annual local seed exchange in next weekend. We're gradually accumulating, and sharing, dozens of unique seed varieties. I love that our packets of traded and gifted seeds have names like "Jenny's Pretty Striped Tomatoes" and "Rosalie's Prize Drying Tomatoes." They connect us to other people and other gardens in the community. This year we decided we're going to participate in the Canadian Tomato Project, growing, observing and reporting on several recognized Canadian tomato varieties. There was some discussion today amongst the GRUBS about factory farming and the loss of genetic diversity that results; interestingly, the DVD "The Fight for True Farming" is sitting in our Zip.ca pile right now awaiting viewing.

We decided that our big GRUBS project for this year should be a shed. We would so dearly love to be able to leave tools, equipment and supplies safely at the garden, rather than carting them back and forth from home every week. We are looking at this Lee Valley bracket kit that would give us a simple starting point; hopefully we'll get a fair bit of salvaged and/or donated lumber and sheathing.

Round and round

Wednesday was Pi Day, and we didn't notice. It was 3.14, at least according to the US convention for numbering dates. Here in Canada one more commonly sees 14 03 2007, but in any event, we didn't really notice. A day later I was reading Karen's LightingTheFires blog and I realized we'd missed the whole deal. Not that I would have purposely set out to create a celebration out of anything other than a sense of humour. My kids have a tendency to run out of the room when they perceive that I have slipped on my secret "Facilitator of Fun Projects Kids can Learn From" hat, so anything other than circular grilled cheese sandwiches would have fallen pretty flat with them.

But here's the funny thing. Lots of pi and circle things happened without us noticing.

At Science Club, or "NOS [Not Only Science] Club" as it should more properly be termed these days, D. had brought some colour mixing demonstrations and activities. One involved drawing coloured dots on circles of card and then rapidly spinning them to enable the eye to see the 'blended' colour. We used the K'nex solar motor. Given the little bit of spring-like sun we were afforded, it worked quite well. They got lovely blurs of purples and browns rather than the discrete colours they had drawn.

Later, my kids used the same motor, attached blank pieces of circular card and spun them, applying felt markers at high speed and ending up with blurred circular colour effects that they named "Amanra's CD's." They then went on their typical weird story-telling rampage, creating some sort of strange scenario whereby Amanra keeps ruining CD players because she cannot for the life of her figure out what is wrong with the beautiful and inexpensive CD's she is creating.

And then, since they were on a circular artwork kick, it was either spirograph or paint in the salad spinner next. We'd been talking about doing that latter for a while, and it seemed an opportune moment. We cut out yet more circles of cardstock, placed them one at a time in our ratty salad spinner, drizzled on blobs of watery acrylic paint, and cranked away. Clean-up could have been worse. We worked quickly and the paint hadn't really started to dry. A rinse, a quick wash with a cloth and a few scrubs here and there with an old toothbrush and we were good to go for salad again. Acrylic paint is non-toxic, right?

Finally, having finished "King of the Middle March" and "Bridge to Terabithia" as readalouds in the last few days, we needed to pick out a new novel for evening reading aloud. Noah and Sophie are enjoying Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" so much that I figured we needn't be restricted to children's novels. So on a whim I pulled down Yann Martel's "Life of Pi." Pi's real name is Piscine Molitor Patel, but when he enters secondary school, he changes it to Pi, as in π, as in 3.14159...

And we didn't notice any of this until March 15th.

Incidentally, when Erin was 6 or 7 and had taken an interest in pi, Noah, then 4, asked what we were talking about. I explained that pi was a special number that mathematicians sometimes used that was part way between 3 and 4. Noah instantly invented a number called cabbage that is "part way between 4 and 5." So stayed tuned for Cabbage Day, sometime in April. Goodness knows what weird coincidences that will bring.

Atomic Tree Ornaments

Another product of Science Club. Two marbles, a black one (proton) and a white one (neutron) were twisted together inside a small square of plastic wrap (in lieu of nuclear force) and tied off with a string. Around this we created an electron cloud of wool roving. Not particularly seasonal or aesthetically imbued, several of our elemental hydrogen atoms have nonetheless ended up gracing our Christmas tree.

Acids and Alkalis

Today was another challenging Science Club meeting. The kids were very unfocused and there were only a couple of activities that pulled even half of them in. My four were all at various stages of recovering from illnesses, as were several of the other kids, and that certainly didn't help. However, I wanted to share this photo of our indicator solution. We boiled purple cabbage and decanted off the water to use for testing the pH of various mystery solutions. I'd never really gone through the business of creating a range of indicator colours side by side -- but we did today and were thrilled with the striking colours. Shown above are solutions of pH ~ 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.