Fruit Clock

Our time spent playing with electricity last week has lead to lots more - the girls favourite was a citrus clock they made.

It happily kept time for 6 days and 11 hours before it died.

Bones, our improved geodesic dome and playing with electricity

Our randomness continues with bone explorations this week - looking at skeletons, structure of bones and 'melting' (aka bending) a bone in vinegar.

We restarted our done using drinking straws working on inter spacing pentagons and triangles which is working beautifully apart from running out of straws (over 100 used so far).

We also had a played with electricity - we read a random fact about salt and had to try it for ourselves. Apparently salt only conducts electricity when it is dissolved (in its solid form the lattice structure won't conduct) so we tried it with daddy's salt deodorant stick (needs must) and scrapped some off to dissolve in water (don't tell on us).

This led to some further experiments with the conductivity of water and discovering that distilled/pure water doesn't conduct electricity (it only conducts if it contain minerals or salts) but the girls decided that if there is water on the floor you still need to keep away from electricity as it's unlikely to be pure so you still won't be safe :)

Water Filters, Skittles and starting our Geodesic Dome

Rose has tons of random experiments she wants to do so we said as its summer she can do as many as she likes - hence why this week we had to build her water filter, then improve it so it would actually clean muddy water, start a geodesic dome (you may see more of that next week if she can get it to work) and play with the rainbow.

Her first water filter was large pebbles, small gravel, sponge and filter paper - it only filtered some of the mud out so she set off to find out how to make it better.

Trial and error (best way to learn) ended up with the first layer being the pebbles and gravel, the second layer was sand, third was sponge again but she used a lot more and the final layer was 4 layers of filter paper - it was much slower to filter but the water was sparkling :)

They also played rainbows with skittles in water.

You gotta smile when....

....your daughter decides writing her new joke out counts as her creative writing for the day and when you agree she tries to push for it counting as maths too :)

The joke in question;
Why is a dog so long?
He has 4 feet.

Bat Camp

Our last home ed camp of the summer was Bat Camp.

We learnt about nocturnal creatures,

made moth lure from molasses, sugar, mashed banana and coke which the kids placed on strategic tree stumps and fence posts (you use a red light to view them which is just a torch covered in red plastic),

set up a moth trap (and spent the next morning identifying the types caught - there were 18 in the trap across 8 species - before releasing them back into the wild),

discussed how bat boxes differ from bird boxes,

played 'hunting' games where you had to use just your sense of sound to try and catch your prey and another focussed on your sense of smell,

and stayed up very late to watch for bats - Rose was super excited because she spotted six.