The Colorado Adventure

Crystals, army, Legos, plane

13 Mar 2008 1 Comment

by liese4 in co-ops, kids, library, School Stuff

We started a salt garden toady.

Each kid has their own sponge with this mixture on it: 2 T water, 2 T salt, 2 T bluing and 2 T ammonia. I think we used too much ammonia. This project doesn’t have a chemical reaction; it’s just evaporation of the water and bluing to make salt crystals. Here is the bluing page with directions and explanation.

We mixed it all together and poured it on the sponges, later I reseeded them with each item put on the sponge one by one.

Here it is tonight, hopefully tomorrow it will have more crystals on it.

Tomorrow we’re going to have 4 sponges (since there are 4 ingredients) and each sponge will be missing 1 ingredient. I wonder which one will be most likely to grow a crystal and which one least likely? Stay tuned to find out.

After lunch we ran over to a friend’s house for a co-op on the Normandy invasion. She had army guys and bunkers waiting.

The kids set up Omaha, Juno and Utah beaches with forces.

Some had tanks, some had boats, and some had guys missing heads (Bethany found that guy.) Juno beach I am sad to say was Bethany and Grace and after they set up the guys they claimed a bomb hit them all, end of Juno.

Omaha fared better, the guys were set up and advancing nicely.

Finally Utah beach, here’s Joel setting it up.

Here are the Germans on the beach from above.

The forces chased them all over the rug, with British and American forces helped by Canadians until finally…..

Then it was time to pick up, Hannah was the medic.

Next time the kids are doing Gettysburg. They will paint their guys and make better bunkers, maybe out of paper mache.

From there we went by the library (not ours) for a digital Lego workshop. Joel was doing that while the girls and I checked out books. Why can’t I go into a library and not come out with 20 books? I did find a cool one on camping, one on African cooking for GS tomorrow and a magic book for Joel. Joel got a CD of his creation to take home, I haven’t looked at it yet though. Next up for him at the library is a movie making workshop, I’ll be impressed if he comes out of that with a movie after only an hour!

We got directions to Joel’s Chief’s house to drop him off. They are working on their model airplanes tonight. Joel took his glider test and aced it (well, he got an 85 anyway.) He printed out his certificate so that means he can fly Saturday (now if the weather will hold.) He also took his search and rescue test and passed it, printing out another certificate (and one more thing checked off of the list of stuff to complete for that group.) He got logged into CAP’s e-services web program which enables him to take on-line tests for promotion and other neat stuff. Busy, busy.

Tomorrow is James’ day off, that means we get a nice breakfast cooked by him (I don’t cook breakfast.) We will work on our crystal project and add a string salt crystal project and cook our African food for GS. We’re making fufu and kiliwili (I’ll post a recipe tomorrow for that.)