The Colorado Adventure

No, we don’t.
Just because, we never have, so we don’t.
We did however, go out to eat.
Buy 6 pounds of candy.
Got a hotel room.
Watched the last 2 episodes of Lost season 3 and ate candy.
It was nice.

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Or, should school be fun for a 14 year old? I just said today on our HS group’s chat board that sometimes it isn’t easy making school ‘fun’ as kids get older. I mean c’mon, sometimes learning is boring and there is stuff you think you don’t need to know, but probably should know and maybe it’s boring. I’m not a miracle worker; some stuff is just going to be boring.

So, after regular schoolwork today we broke out our bag of marshmallows and went outside to do some fun stuff. How can I make modeling chemical reactions fun?

I had Joel balance a few equations on the sidewalk and then he had to model them with marshmallows and balance them. (It’s NH3 + CuO = N2 + Cu + H2O, balanced it’s 2NH3 + 3CuO = N2 + 3 Cu + 3 H2O.)

I think the marshmallows worked better than chalk, you can see where an H disappears in the first one and then is balanced out in the second equation.

Outside we used the marshmallows to discover force and what happens to things that aren’t strapped in (like we didn’t already know that!) It’s called ‘crashmallow’, sorry the ‘c’ got clipped off in the pic.

We put a marshmallow on a toy car (we had to try 3 cars to get it to work) and then pushed it down the hill colliding it with a ruler. The marshmallow was thrown from the car varying lengths according to how much force we used. Bethany threw hers 3 feet, but it kind of rolled down the hill too, so I’m not sure that was such a great measurement.

Bethany had a quick review of place value; I had her hop on the ones, tens or hundreds box when I stepped on a number.

Grace was hopping on letters spelling out words; she added a few letters to make other words.

Hannah thought that would be fun too, so I had her go to a letter when I said it.

She found A, H and T and spelled hat. Back inside the marshmallows were being used to make 3-d space figures and Hannah made a colored pattern without any help!

What else can you do with a bag of colored marshmallows?

Learn about ratios and proportions, estimate, model figures, do some geometry (make line segment OY – orange, yellow), use them as math counters, spell words by making them into letters, make a tabletop trebuchet and use them as cannonballs (nope, we haven’t made our trebuchet yet), blow them up in the microwave and talk about the reaction that just took place, feed them to the dog (not that I would advise that), eat them!

OK, so I tried to make chemistry more fun and Joel does have a better understanding of the balancing of an equation, but I still insist that not everything needs to be fun (I’m off to make a model of the Eiffel tower out of marshmallows….)

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So, I decided that we were taking a field trip today to satiate our wanderlust desire. I wanted to make it to Bishop’s castle before it snowed, and since it hasn’t snowed (yet!) today was the day.

We drove past the Springs and took a little highway to cut through the mountains and then took a series of county roads before arriving here.

This castle was stared in 1969 by Jim Bishop. Except for a set of spiral stairs made by his father, Jim has created this gorgeous building with his own hands.

He has carried the rocks, cemented them, created spiral stair cases and gothic arches, metal scroll work and put in stained glass windows.

There are turrets and onion domes and passages to explore.

You may climb up a set of stairs and end up in a doorway with nothing underneath you (it’s a work in progress.)

You may be outside on the balcony and come upon a set of stairs that leads to a ‘bridge to nowhere’ (literally!)

Mr. Bishop isn’t finished with this dome as you can see Joel up there in the open.

We climbed up 3 sets of spiral staircases in different parts of the building; here is the tippy-top of the front turret.

Look at the scroll work on the arches in the cathedral!

He’s also working on what looked like a moat and bridge at the entrance.

Don’t worry about the signs, the state and local government gave him a hard time when he started building this…..art in ’69, so he posts signs to make sure that you know he’s not responsible for injuries and that if you’re in law enforcement he has constitutional rights and you’d better not trample them.

He got around some of the building laws (technically this isn’t a building, it’s art) by incorporating as a 501c3, so you can make tax deductible donations to his project.

Why would a man build a castle and then not live in it? Obviously he just wants to make us happy and let us have a good time, and we did!

Thanks Mr. Bishop!

Oh, and if you have small children, watch out, you can climb over the entire thing, but there are some kid sized holes and no guard rails on the turrets. We stayed there for 2 hours exploring and marveling at the sights. While we ate lunch we fed a crested jay that hopped out of the tree by our table, it was very nice indeed.

After a few more climbs we got in the car and headed to Pueblo.

Of course I wouldn’t make a trip and be so close to Pueblo and not go!

We went by the river walk, which probably looks much nicer when they don’t drain the river. It’s almost like the one in San Antonio (except they have more shops clustered around the water.) Then we had to decide between the children’s museum or the air museum, we chose the Buell (my maiden name, no relation though, darn it!) Children’s museum since we were a few blocks away. That is a cool museum! Their theme was Western/Indian.

There was a teepee, dress up clothes, costumes, weave a basket, paint a pony, make a handkerchief, make an old photo wanted poster, tool leather, and more.

Grace was fascinated by this kinetic sculpture, she stood there watching the balls clink around the whole thing (Joel thought it would be easy to make that.) The leather tooling craft was a hit with all the kids.

They got to braid a leather bracelet and then stamp some pieces of leather. James’s mom was a leather tooler so that was a good connection since Joel doesn’t remember her and the girls never knew her. When we got home I showed them the leather bag and wallet that she tooled. My friend Kathy was right; this museum is great (unlike the Denver children’s museum.) There was something for the kids to do from Hannah to Joel, that’s quite an accomplishment. We stayed until closing and I promised to come back when they change out the western theme for the next one. Next time we’re down we’ll stop by here and the air museum. I thought it was a lot further to get home, but my GPS told me that from Pueblo it was 1 hour 40 min, not bad.

I love Colorado!

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Grace was bummed that she had to play on the blue team because there weren’t enough blues that showed up. It was hard to tell which team people were on with coats on, it was 45 and pretty chilly out there. Hannah was once again her own team otter.

Not just any team, but Cooper the otter team, see her new size 1 ball?

It’s cute and only took me 4 soccer games to remember to buy it! The red team won the game, but Grace had fun (although I noticed that she wasn’t helping the blue team much since she decided she wasn’t really on the blue team.) We have a make up game on Wednesday and then that’s it, time to do awards and free play.

I’m glad we have nice weather this week so we can get 2 games in, the kids were much better today too. Not a bunch of ball huddlers like they were in the beginning.

Dance went well, Grace and Hannah are through with their whole dance, Bethany is on the last verse and I’m on the last verse and chorus. It’s starting to come more naturally now….practice makes perfect. Actually I don’t want to be perfect; I just want to have the movements come as worship and not just movements in a dance that I learned. We got our other Rachel back so now we have 8 women dancing. I wrote a poem to go along with our devotionals on pride/humility and our teacher, Laura, wrote them up all pretty with calligraphy. I’ll post it later.

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James thought that meant we were going to see stem cells, no. It stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. I heard that the Friday one was really packed with lots of school kids. So, I knew that Saturday would be better. The school kids wouldn’t voluntarily come on a non-school day! I was right!

We got in and answered some space questions to win star markers and a model of a satellite (which is going to take awhile to put together, lots of tabs.) Bethany had to say the planets (she asked them if they wanted Pluto as an answer or not, we’re fond of Pluto, so we haven’t dismissed it as a planet.) Joel had to say which planet has the most moons (Jupiter), Grace had to say how long it takes for the earth to go around the sun (from 1 birthday to the next.) Then we went over to the electricity booth.

There we shocked each other silly and magnetized a piece of PVC pipe by rubbing it with a cloth to move it’s electrons around. We played with magnets there too, here’s a game where you push 1 magnet and it hits 3 others and then knocks down a piece of wood.

Hannah thought it was cool.

We wandered through aerospace booths, saw robots running around and saw a working trebuchet (which gave us an idea….we’re going to make one.) Then we headed over to the DNA extraction booth. The guy there said it would take about 30 minutes to do the experiment and looked at the girls. Yeah, we can sit for 30 minutes (he had 50 school kids at a time the day before overwhelming him and not sitting still.) First we were given a vial of Gatorade to swish in our mouths and then spit in a cup (Hannah looked at me like, what? Spit it out, but it’s my favorite drink!) We did that and then put it back in the vial. We added soap to it, swished it around and then placed it under our arms for 15 minutes (this was the sit still part.) We had to heat up the solution so the soap could break down our cheek cells. Hannah just had fun using the pipette to transfer soap and Gatorade back and forth from the cup to the vial.

After 15 minutes we slowly added ethanol into the vial and then after a few minutes we could see a globby white substance start to form, this was our DNA. I tried to hook mine out, but ended up using the pipette to suck it out and transfer it to a vial we could wear around our neck. Grace’s DNA never formed (probably because she was eating mints right before), Bethany’s and mine came out good, Joel’s was not very formed, but I manage to suck out a few particles.

The guy helping us praised the kids for being so patient and Joel tried to swipe some more vials to play with at home (no dice.) We wondered if you could use alcohol to separate the DNA instead of ethanol. We also found out you could get more than human DNA (say if you ate a burger before doing this) in your sample. But still, that was pretty cool.

Here is a cool experiment we saw. You stick some eggs in 3 solutions: corn syrup, water and salt water. If the mixture is Hypertonic then water molecules diffuse out of the cell (egg.) If the mix is Hypotonic it’s got more water coming into the cell. And if it’s Isotonic it’s the same flowing in and out of the cell. I think I’ll get jars with a lid though! (Corn syrup is hypertonic, salt water is hypotonic.)

We wandered around some more, through the star lab, by the zoo booth and saw a prairie dog.

It’s not that we can’t see them at home, but they sure are cute up close. We went by this science supply booth where Bethany won a magnifying glass and calipers.

We got to see a lot of science equipment up close and play some games. We went by the shadow puppet booth and the make a movie booth where Bethany made a you tube video of her dance from last Christmas. We went by the math estimating booth where Grace was right on for 2 of the guesses (how many balls in a jar.) At a college booth Joel asked if he could solve the rubix cubes, the guy said yes so Joel did all 3 of them in a few minutes. The guy asked for Joel’s name so that when he was ready for college he could recruit him. Joel knows there is math involved in the formula to solve the cube, but really he just memorized the whole thing. We saw earth science booths, rocks, space stuff, engineering, chemistry and machines, awesome!

We left with lots of stuff, posters, handouts, information from colleges, DNA and of course calipers. On the way home we stopped off to buy some test tubes (we want to do the DNA extraction again) Joel didn’t find any beakers so we have to get those. We are going to do another DNA extraction, build a trebuchet and use marshmallows to model chemical reactions I’m sure I’ll finds a use for those calipers too.

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The topic was comedy this month. Bethany did a report about the Colbert Report. She gave us a short bio of him (we didn’t know he had 10 brothers and sister and wanted to be a marine biologist when he was a kid.) Then we did a sketch of ‘The Word’, it was Truthiness (yes, we know that’s not really a word.) It’s funnier on TV.

Joel did a monologue of rhetorical questions such as:
Is it true that cannibals don’t eat clowns because they taste funny?
If 7-11 is open 24 hours a day, every day of the year…why is there a lock on the door?
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
Is it good if a vacuum really sucks?
How do you know when you’re out of invisible ink?

Grace made up some whale jokes, mostly based on stuff she’s heard and just putting the word whale in it, but still some of them are pretty funny:
What’s invisible and smells like krill? Whale farts!
Knock, knock. Who’s there? Whale. Whale who? Whale you come swimming with me?
How many whales does it take to change a light bulb? None! There aren’t any light bulbs in the ocean!

The other kids did very well, especially 2 that haven’t been there in awhile. They spoke up, looked at the audience and we could hear them! Yeah!

After p-club we went to the park to play with our friends and then trekked home. It was a beautiful day, about 70, sunny…….I don’t know where my snow is, but I have faith that it’s coming.

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Today (because I know I want to do a day trip next week and ‘in structure there is freedom’) we chunked a lot of subjects. Bethany chunked 3 maths, 5 histories, and 5 literatures. Joel chunked 5 maths and did some history, grammar and writing. Grace chunked 3 maths, 5 phonics and 3 grammars. What does that mean; it just means that things that go together in a unit can be done all at once because their objectives are the same. Tomorrow Joel will finish off his grammar unit and science unit, Bethany will finish off a science unit and Grace will finish off a history and science unit. This will free us up next week to go on our field trip, have Monday off and just have a nice week. We can still learn, but we won’t have to ‘do’ as much paperwork for the week.

We covered some science at the museum yesterday too, the liquid nitrogen experiments (Joel’s), the heart, lung, brain dissections (Bethany’s and Grace’s.) so that’s pretty cool. Only 1 more week and I can start filling up our November calendar when the new kid’s pages comes out.

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Well, the last phonics class was today. We did the last 8 letters, I had trouble over at US toy finding a goat for the letter ‘g’. My song was ‘goats gobble garbage’ and I really wanted a goat, but I had to settle for a gecko. We glued tissue paper leaves onto a sheet for ‘l’, colored some notes for ‘n’ and looked at an x-ray for ‘x’. I gave the kids a whistle for ‘w’, probably should have waited until the class was over for that. The library admin. offices are right across from the meeting room and the librarian walked by and gave me the evil eye because of the noise. We were trying to do thumbprint whales too, but mostly the kids just got ink all over their hands. It said washable on the stamp pads (well, they are, it just takes more than one washing!) We passed around a zipper for ‘z’ and did ‘u’ and then attached it to its friend ‘q’ (they always travel together in the front a word.) Then we had free play. I brought both water pads this time and our fishing letter game. Hannah actually said her hard ‘c’ the other day. If she thinks about it she can say her name is ‘carberry’ instead of ‘tarberry’ (which is a real improvement!)

After we dropped off our stuff at home and ate lunch we got Joel and headed over to the natural science museum AKA the dinosaur musuem (yes, because it was free day.)

They rearranged the kid discovery room, but before we went in there we saw the dissection room. I guess that’s why they’ve been doing the dissections at the library, to show off their new area at the museum. They had just done a brain dissection, they had a heart and lung out too.

Here’s the skeleton with the insides vest on.

They had a few slices of the visible human project in the area too (don’t click on that link if you get grossed out, it’s sections of the human body that have been sliced thinly.)

So we looked around and felt the brain again, put together a brain puzzle and smelled tubes of stuff and matched them to the pictures.

The discovery area was revamped; one item missing is the dinosaur dig box. Guess they got tired of picking up all that sand. Hannah had fun with the bubbles – that would make a good co-op, playing with bubbles.

Bethany stayed around the digital microscope, I really need to get one of those, they are so cool. We like shoving it in our nose and ears (but you can’t do that at the museum.)

Down in the gem and mineral area we saw the Molybdates, rocks (such as wulfenite) that have molybdenum in them.

We know all about molly because James took a mine trip with SME where they got to see a mine at the continental divide where they pull molybdenum out of rocks. It takes a lot of rock to make a little molly, which is used in stuff like missiles, rifles, aircraft, diet drinks and food that grows above the ground (which has more molly in it than food that grows under the ground.) Mmmmm……would you like some more molybdenum on your peas?

Anyway in the space exhibit we sat and watched some cool experiments. The scientist said to imagine that we were trying to land a rover and explore the moon Triton. It’s a moon of Neptune and it’s the farthest moon from the sun, so it’s really cold there. The atmosphere is liquid nitrogen and the temp. is about -340 degrees.

So he started the experiment with a balloon and dipped it in the nitrogen. The air inside the balloon liquefied and we could see it sloshing around the inside of the balloon. When he took it out and the air warmed up it refilled the balloon. Pretty neat. Next he dropped a rubber ball in the nitrogen and then dropped it on the ground, of course it shattered. The rubber hose he dropped in became rigid and brittle, but the nylon he dropped in stayed flexible. Next he tried to see what would happen to ball bearings and magnets when exposed to the nitrogen. The ball bearings froze up, but the magnetic arm worked fine because no matter how small the magnets became they still had a magnetic field around them. The last thing he did was to create a liquid nitrogen geyser and make nitrogen snow.

When he was done he gave the kids the pieces of rubber ball that had broken. Hannah ate hers, but I guess a bit of rubber than has been frozen in liquid nitrogen doesn’t do much to you (in other words, she’s fine and it’ll be on the way out tomorrow.) Joel asked the guy where one might procure some liquid nitrogen – smart guy, he said he didn’t know (Joel pressed him on it and he admitted he might know where to get some, but it would be industrial grade and they wouldn’t sell it to Joel.) So that was really fun, maybe next time we can see the lung dissection.

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We went to the park by us and helped a friend who missed our bridging ceremony to bridge to the next GS level.

R started off on the brownie side with Grace, crossed the bridge and got her junior vest from Bethany.

Hmmm….maybe we should use this park next year, decorate the bridge and have it on a Saturday so Dad’s can come. The only problem would be lighting the candles, I’m sure they’d never stay lit in the wind. While there I finished my furry yarn hat, here’s Bethany modeling it.

None of the girls liked it though, so later I gave it to a friend. It’s very 50’s. I think they’d sell like hotcakes at the headless chicken festival. We stayed until the weather got colder and then went home to get Joel. BTW, here is my hat made from the wool that I spun on my drop spindle (which I learned to do at a class from the library.)

It’s pretty good, the yarn is big in some areas and smaller in others, I think it gives it character!

We had Megan from the DMNS at the library to talk to us about brains.

She did a helmet safety talk and Joel was her mannequin.

We saw some brains from animals other than us, a rabbit, a turtle, and a fish (they have really small brains.) But, it’s not the size of your brain that matters, it’s the wrinkles. Einstein had 3 times more wrinkles on his brain than the average Joe, interesting. The wrinkles are called gyri. We did an activity where we hopped on one foot and then the other, which was to demonstrate the cerebellum and what it does for our body. She passed around a gel brain (it’s not real) and the kids got to touch it.

We talked about different areas of the brain that control sight, taste, smell, thinking, etc. We talked about right/left brain areas and what they do.

She said if you’re having a hard day cross your legs and your arms to get the 2 halves of the brain to talk to each other.

Then we did the sheep brain dissection. Megan was cool; she sat on the floor so everyone could see.

She cut off the brain stem and the cerebellum and then cut the cerebrum in half.

Lastly, we got to make a brain hat; Megan was impressed with our hat from home (even if the foam peanuts shrunk.) We glued on smell, taste, sight, hearing, and movement sections in their correct spots and then stuck the hat together. Here’s Hannah with hers.

I’m sad that the dissections are over; we could have made a lot more stuff. Oh, that reminds me we need to put a chicken bone in vinegar so it can get all floppy (just because.)

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In anticipation of our brain dissection later today we made a brain hat and found out useful info. about the hemispheres of the brain. The orange is the occipital lobe (controls sight), the purple is the parietal lobe (motor control, sensory info.), the yellow is the frontal lobe (complex thinking.)

I didn’t realize the packing foam would shrink when we painted them, darn eco-friendly people must have made them out of cornstarch. I guess I should have used markers.

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS

uses logic
detail oriented
facts rule
words and language
present and past
math and science
can comprehend
knowing
acknowledges
order/pattern perception
knows object name
reality based
forms strategies
practical
safe

RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS

uses feeling
“big picture” oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can “get it” (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking

This video is really interesting. It’s a guy who used to have seizures and they cut the nerves between the brain’s hemispheres. Now if an object comes up on the right side of the screen or the left side, his brain can’t talk to the other half. So the doc has him draw the object with his left hand (right brain) and then he can tell what it is. Isn’t our brain amazing?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo

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14 years ago, sniff, at 5:37 am after 2 days in labor and 3 hours of pushing…a 6 lb 10 oz baby boy was born to us in our apartment in Katy, TX.

Now my first born male child is 14. I don’t feel any older, but wow!

14 years is a long time, here are 14 things about Joel:

He picks things up quickly (like magic, flying, hockey, archery…)
He learned how to juggle clubs after watching a juggler and trying it once.

The Capt. that was with him on his first powered flight thought the had flown before.
He was recently promoted in CAP.

He’s flown in a glider and a Cessna.

He can do math, but doesn’t like it.
He’s a bit obsessive about things (like he has 7 light sabers and probably 10 air soft guns.)
He can take the bus by himself to the mall.

He’s never been to ‘real’ school.

He was on the winning inline hockey team when he was 11.
He wants to fly a plane or work on them for a living.

He volunteers at Wings over the Rockies (although all that he’s done so far is clean the planes.)

He thinks he’s getting a driver’s license in a year!

He usually writes about planes, flying or CAP.

Today he gets my presents, a new (old) canteen with cup attached and some magic tricks. No, I’m not supplying any more guns to his wall of weapons! He got the day off because it’s his birthday. He actually made me sign a contract to that effect (but I was going to give him the day off anyway.) So he’s watching TV and organizing his new guns into his new ammo box, later he’ll be ironing his uniform for CAP, no he doesn’t get to get out of that. I’m sure he’ll vote tonight that they need to have another air soft war since he now has an automatic rifle, sigh.

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I still have 2 days until Joel is really 14, but we had his party today. Can you tell that the theme was camo/army/gun?

I found a camo tablecloth, camo plates, cups, napkins and helmets over at US toy. I got dog tags, camo wristbands and grenades as favors (and those of you who left without them, I saved you some.) I was going to make a camo cake, but we bought a chocolate one instead. We put chips in the helmets and when the kids arrived they went outside for an air soft war. As you can see they were well prepared (some more than others) for a plastic bb onslaught.

Joel made 2 bunkers in the back and the teams hid out behind them trying to entice people out to get shot.

They had fun!

After a brief intermission for pizza and drinks it was time to open presents. Almost everything was air soft related. He got a few new guns, holder, WWII ammo box, glasses, ammo, a laser tag chess game and money. Then came James’s present, as you can see it caused quite a stir.

All of a sudden everyone said, ‘I’m on Joel’s team!’ After cake they went back out to war (really they were just waiting for the battery to charge up to the new gun.) Then they went up the street and played in the open space. Don’t worry we’re using biodegradable pellets. I have about a cups worth of them lying around the house right now too.

So, nobody got hurt, Joel got what he wanted, with a few surprises and he had fun. An excellent party indeed!

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At GS today we were supposed to be working on our 3-D art badge. Well, we did work on our badges, but there were only 4 GS there, and 2 of them were mine! (Hannah is a ‘future daisy’.) It’s a little frustrating to come up with ideas and stuff for a meeting and then have almost everyone bail. Thankfully I don’t have to plan anymore meetings this year. Yeah, I know I could just not plan anything, but then we’d just sit around talking while the girls play. That is not what a GS troop is supposed to be about, sure talk at the beginning of a meeting, but to me each meeting should have some goal – a badge, community service, something.

I set up tables with different forms of 3-D art and let the girls go around choosing what they would do. We had kiragami (paper cutting) which was a little hard to do without an exacto knife, but still doable. Here is Grace’s dolphin and Bethany’s waves with paperclips.

One table had paper sculpture and mobiles. That was to connect with the sculptor Alex Calder. I read a quick bio of him and told the girls that some of his work is at the DAM. Here is Hannah’s sculpture, ignore the crying (she had just gotten in trouble.)

I love the shadow on the wall behind Grace’s sculpture, its neat art in itself.

Here’s what happens if you lay the papers flat.

Here is Hannah’s mobile and Grace’s leaf mobile.

We had paper birds with paper clip feet. I know birds sound like spring, but the scrapbook papers I picked out were kind of fall colors, so they look more like fall birds. Here are some of the birds.

We had a clay table with books about wood carving and polymer clay sculpture and art. I didn’t get pics of that one, but we had a cat, some lollipops and a sun amongst other creations. I think everybody had fun (all the girls like crafts) and if they did all 5 items and read about Alex Calder they earned the badge.

Here is my kiragami, it’s 2 waves on the beach.

Bird template
Kiragami
Alex Calder
Paper sculpture (It should stay up by itself, but you can tape the pieces when you have them where you want them.)

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Today we’re making our own still. Not to make spirits, but to separate ingredients and see what makes up liquids. Also Grace was learning about solid, liquid and gas. To make the distiller:

-Wrap aluminum foil around a broom handle and tape the seams shut with duct tape, you might even want to tape around the whole thing (although we didn’t.)
-You can use 1 roll length wise, we used two, but it doesn’t have to be that long.
-Take off that section and save it. Now do that again, but when you take it off cut it into 2 pieces and bend them (these will attach to both ends of the main tube.)
**You can just bend the original tube instead of making 2 seperate ends, just be sure the ends don’t get crumpled.
-Measure out 200ml of liquid (we did cranberry juice, diet soda and orange soda.)
-Put 200ml of the liquid (one at a time please) into a pan.
-Cover the pan with 4 squares of foil and cut a hole in the center to put the tube through.
-Take the foil square off of the pan and push the tube through, covering all the seams with duct tape.
-On the other end you will have a bowl and a glass jar. Do the same thing with the glass jar, cover it with foil, cut a hole, push the tube through and secure with duct tape.
-Place the glass jar in a bowl with ice cubes around it and get a zip lock bag full of crushed ice (keep it in the freezer until you’re ready to do the experiment.

NOW

-Pour the liquid into the pan and cover with the foil (the tube is already attached) put the glass jar in the bowl of ice and attach the other end of the tube, make sure to duct tape any seams. Place the bag of ice on top of the tube connection.

Here’s what that looks like.

-Turn the stove on high and time it when it starts to boil. In a few seconds you should see water trickling into the glass jar. Let it boil for about 3-5 minutes then shut off the stove.
-Use tongs to open the foil and take it off the pan. Use tongs to take the other end off the glass jar.
-Now pour the liquid in the pan into a measuring cylinder and do the same for the liquid in the glass jar.

We had 200 ml of cranberry juice, 28 ml left in the pan and 9 ml in the glass jar.

See the difference in the liquid from the pan and the liquid straight from the bottle?

**Joel’s note: Don’t drink the leftover liquids, they are very sweet and will make you sick. Also you could just use a piece of PVC pipe and 2 elbows to make the tube, then stick the ends through the foil into the pan and jar. (But my mom was too cheap to go buy PVC pipes.)

So, what happened? We distilled the liquid and took out most of the first ingredient (which is water.) Some water just vaporized and some collected in the jar. The leftover liquid is dark, syrupy and sweet (because the next ingredient is usually sugar.) The water in the glass jar smells like cranberry juice (and in the case of the diet dr. pepper it smelled like caramel.) There was a slight taste of cranberry in the water, the juice that was left over was super sweet tasting.

Grace saw the liquid turn into a gas and then turn back into a liquid as it cooled. She also saw the solid (ice) turn into a liquid and then a gas. We also did the hot air balloon tea bag, it didn’t quite work out.

I only had one regular tea bag, so we’ll have to get some more and try it again. Hannah was busy watching the experiments and using the scale to put gram cubes and beads into.

Off to GS next!

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Yes, my co-op is 3 weeks long, and really it could have been 4 weeks. I did much better today, I took what worked from last week and went with that. We started off with the letter B, we passed around these cool linking letters I got from US toy and said ‘B’, we also had a butterfly puppet. Then I broke out the bubbles and we blew them and then tried to pop them while saying the ‘b’ sound. That was pretty hard. For ‘E’ I had an egg and an eel (not the real thing, although that would have been cool.) If you got the eel you had to say the long ‘e’ and if you got the egg, the short ‘e’. For ‘F’ I read the Foot book and we got Frisbees and flung them around the room. Grace was waiting for ‘P’ because she knew it involved pudding. But first we did ‘O’ and passed around an octopus and a picture of the ocean. Then we did ‘P’. We clapped on the ‘p’ at the end of ‘clap’ and then made a word using magnetic letters. Everyone got a ‘b,o and p’ and we said the sounds as we put them together on the board. Then it was pudding time. I covered a table with a plastic sheet and gave the kids the pudding and no spoons.

Well, you could tell who is allowed to play with their food…..They ate some pudding and drew letters on the table with some of it. Hannah made an ‘O’ and an ‘H’! Grace wrote her name. K and his sister were eating and playing with theirs. S was getting into it.

N made a ‘P’ and we put a ‘V’ on its head to make it look like a bunny.

After the kids were good and dirty and had exhausted their supply of pudding we came back to our circle and did ‘S’. I had scarves and as we did the sound we shaped the scarf into an ‘S’. For ‘V’ we colored a picture of a violin and made the sound as we opened our legs in the shape of a ‘V’. The last letter was ‘Y’, we focused on the ‘Y’ sound like Yak, but we also talked about ‘Y’ saying ‘e’ and saying ‘i’. That’s a lot to get, so I said just focus on the sound in Yucca. After we ran to the letters that I put on the wall we got to do the last thing, water painting! Hannah was excited about that. Her water mat has the alphabet around the edges, so as the kids painted the letters showed up. Next week we’ll only have 8 letters to go over and then we’ll read Anno’s ABC book and play a game with letter sounds. I’m not sure what that will be yet, but I have a week to figure it out!

I left Bethany and Joel at home doing their work and then picked up Bethany for park day. Joel said he didn’t want to go if none of his friends were showing up. They had an interesting paragraph for me to read. The writing prompt for today was: What is your theory about the island (on the TV show Lost)? Both of them had really well thought out sentences about what they think is happening on the island and where they think it is going. We have 2 more episodes for season 2, so we’ll see if they get their theory right or not.

We spent about 2 ½ hours at the park. We had a good group of moms there. The only problem with that park now is that they closed the bathrooms for the season. So, we’re thinking about moving parks to one that’s a little closer to me, a little further for some people. I’m pretty sure they leave the bathrooms open there.

I ran back home after park day to do chores and get dinner ready. It’s teachers night out tonight, woo-hoo! If you are in a HS group and you don’t have a TNO, you should make your group do one. We meet once a month on the 15th from 7-? pm at Whole foods. We used to meet at Borders, but they closed that location and moved into the mall (and now close at 9, ugh!) So we meet at Whole food and talk, cry, laugh and have a good time. If you don’t have a group of like minded moms to hang out with, I’m sorry, because it is great.

Tomorrow the Comcast guy is coming out to fix our internet, it’s up, but really slow. Maybe he will put some of that liquid stuff like in the commercial and I can borrow some of it and get the house clean, dishes done, laundry done, and school done in like 2 minutes! That would be cool!

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