The Colorado Adventure

School today – curious

Today was the day that I’d like to write about in the homeschool magazine, you know the one where they describe their day and you read it and think ‘Yeah, right!’ But, it really was one of those days where things got done, we had fun and we learned (and no, that doesn’t happen everyday.) Joel was studying South America and doing a report on Machu Picchu for geography. In math he was finding out about triangle medians, altitudes and centroids (which I’m guessing will come in handy when trying to plot a flight plan on a map.) Bethany was doing graphs and data gathering, scatter plots, mean, mode, range and the like for math. She chunked a whole unit on grammar, not because she was behind but just because she wanted to. Grace was doing time and money in math and then did grammar. After lunch we gathered up some supplies and went to the Museum of outdoor art for their new exhibit called curiosities. Here’s an explanation of what that means.

Think about back in the day when there were no museums, where did people go to see wonders of the sea?

They might have a friend or know of someone who had a room full of curiosity cabinets that they could look at.

So some artists got together and created this exhibit where they filled cabinets with curious things, oddities, art, books, and some secret stuff too.

This thing is a tornado maker, we’ve seen one at NCAR, but this one is so H.G.Wells time machine looking – it’s cool.

Here is a terrarium and you can go here to find out how to make one.

In the Lewis Carroll exhibit there is a secret door, open it and see Alice’s’ wonderland.

Open the big door and see all the characters from the book.

Hannah loved this sand clock and butterfly.

Grace liked this shell and this fish.

Bethany liked this dress and birds nest.

There were tons of items to look at, we were looking for the key to the book on the desk (I don’t think there is one.) The MOA has a sound gallery that changes with the exhibits too.

This time there were pictures from the Hubble of galaxies, various color changing images and sacred geometry. We saw pictures of labyrinths, mazes and pyramids. We saw geometry in the rose window, in the minotaurs maze and in a chapel’s labyrinth.

With pictures in our minds we went outside and made some rock mazes.

Back at home we made more mazes and drew some pictures of the things we saw at the museum.

Now that we have camera pics to refer back to I’m sure we’ll be making more art out of the curious things we saw today. Since we had seen things like shells, spirals, mazes, I introduced the concept of Fibonacci numbers.

I told the girls that before Fibonacci discovered this set of numbers that is called the golden ratio, the Greeks saw that some things were more pleasing to the eye than others, the Egyptians built pyramids based on the ratio and then Fibonacci found out that 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13…is a sequence that is in nature and math. Pine trees have sets of needles in 2,3,or 5 depending on the species and their cones are Fibonacci numbers too. Pineapples have scales that go around the fruit in rows of 5 then rows of 8 (switching direction) and finally rows of 13 (again switching directions.) If you draw a sprial you can use the numbers, apples have a 5 pointed star in the middle, the list goes on. Go here to see the golden rectangle animation. Anyway I thought that was cool and later they will use the numbers to create a spiral and mazes.

What will you put in your curiosity cabinet?

Anyway more on Fibonacci numbers here, go to the MOA website here, and find out more about curiosity cabinets here.