We went to an activity day last month that was amazing - all about chocolate
: )
We looked at cocoa beans - their nutritional content, how they taste and what they are used for.
we then shelled them and made a traditional Aztec hot chocolate drink,
The kids made chocolate plums and bananas,
did a taste survey to see if milk, dark or white chocolate was their favourite and compiled the results in a bar graph.
They learnt all about the cocoa harvest and which is the right colour pod to harvest (not brown like we all thought),
looked at where it's grown, how it is harvested, discussed fair trade and had to place pods on the giant world map for places where it is grown.
They finished off with a chocolate fountain as a treat.
Summer school is in session - we decided against a complete break as we've learnt from previous experience that they get bored after a week or so, so this year we decided that summer school would be project based fun.
We started with a giraffe anatomy model that I picked up a while ago - the girls built it, researched facts about giraffes, measured out how big various body parts were (how tall it would be against the wall, length of legs, length of neck, it's 50 cm tongue, how heavy it's heart was compared to a humans etc.) and made a poster. They discovered that a giraffe gives birth standing up and Tulip was worried the baby giraffe would have a long way to fall so they finished by watching a giraffe birth on you tube.
June was a mad month - we ended up on 2 Home Ed camping trips but the girls favourite was the Roman Kiln weekend.
They started by walking through the local woods to identify and dig up clay,
they took it back to camp, washed it and started making their pots.
They built a stone and mud kiln,
put their pots in, covered them in straw and popped more clay over the top of the kiln to seal it in.
The adults had the job of keeping the kiln hot for 14 hours (but thankfully we were able to take it in shifts so we did get some sleep)
These were the results the next day : )
The girls did some posters to notate their work on layers of the atmosphere.
Lilly chose to do lift the flap layers
while Sunflower did a layered poster with facts written on each layer. (think she just wanted an excuse to use the pastels)
I love how they always manage to express themselves individually even when the assignment is the same : )
