Six-Second Science Fair and color-changing Polly Pockets spark an eventful week of exploration and learning

Starting two weeks ago, I decided to try an idea gleaned from a local homeschoolers' email list, in a discussion about record keeping. One mom used a teacher's plan book to keep track of her kids' studies -- one column per kid. I used teacher plan books for four years as a secondary teacher (one column per class), and I'm comfortable with that format. The next day I saw a teacher plan book on the $1 rack at Target, so I bought it and gave it a try.

I set things up with one column per general subject area, so I could see how our activities and learning were balancing out across subjects. The first problem I noticed was that teacher plan books only go Monday-Friday! That's okay -- I had a column left over, so we use that for overflow: Saturday and Sunday activites, and anything I can't fit in the regular columns for the week.

I leave the plan book on a coffee table by the couch where I frequently take little rests during the day, so it's easy to jot down whatever's happened most recently. This is also nice because instead of being in front of my computer in the kitchen when I'm making notes, I'm closer to whatever the kids are doing, and off my feet!

So this week, my summary will be loosely organized by subject. Some things overlap -- we Read about Science or History, for example. It's all good.

Science

• One morning, P brought me a small Lego construction: a buoy with a flag on top, easily recognizable. We tried floating it in a bowl of water, and it floated on its side. Throughout the day, both kids and I tried different things to try to get it to float upright: adding more weight on the bottom, etc. P found that it would float upright if she removed the sideways-pointing part of the flag, which was making its weight distribution asymmetric.
• P asked me how her Polly Pocket's hair was able to turn pink when warm and purple when cold. I didn't know, so we looked it up online. We found two possible mechanisms: thermochromism and halochromism. P was game for an explanation, so I drew diagrams to talk about different colors of light having different wavelengths; constructive and destructive interference resulting in crystals looking the colors they do, and how a crystal whose plane spacing changes could look different colors as the path length difference for diffracted light changes. These were in ascending order of complexity, and I think P grasped about the first half. Then we looked at halochromism and looked up the materials typically used and their relevant stats, especially the melting point of dodecanol, which turns out to be very close to that of coconut oil! When the dodecanol is liquid, salts in the halochromic microcapsules are dissolved, which changes the pH of the package and results in the protonation (or loss of a proton) by a dye molecule, which changes color as a result. I put a small lump of solid-at-room-temperature coconut oil on P's fingertip, and we watched it quickly melt; so it was easy to see how a transition from ice water to warm breath could change the color of a doll's hair if it had halochromic microcapsules on board. Again, I think P grasped the melting point and solubility parts, but the finer points of pH-driven reactions are a bit beyond our current level.
• We all watched a great video, which we found on thekidshouldseethis.com, full of 6-second science fair videos. One bit showed putting eggs into vinegar and dissolving the shells, so the eggs end up squishy sacs of yolk and white. P and I decided to do that, and watched the bubbling surfaces of the eggs. I know calcium carbonate was a major constituent of eggshells, so we also put a Tums in some vinegar to see if it would behave similarly, which it did (until the reaction stopped, probably because there wasn't enough vinegar in the little bowl we were using -- this led to a little talk about limiting reagents in reactions). I looked up the chemical reaction between calcium chloride and acetic acid, and P and I talked some about that, drawing diagrams of the molecules and noting which parts would dissociate or connect. The partial charges on the ions in the reactions needed more explanation, so I drew some atomic-shell diagrams to talk about why an atom might be inclined to gain or give up an electron. I used the ionic bonding of NaCl as an extreme example of this, and we found a cool video showing NaCl dissolving. The shape of the NaCl crystal in the video as it dissolved, first becoming pitted and then coming apart more completely, was reminiscent of what we'd seen in the dissolving antacid.

• Meanwhile, we kept an eye on the eggs. They were brown eggs, and we were surprised to see that the brown color didn't go all the way through the shells, but was the first part to dissolve away, while there was still plenty of hard shell left. We wondered whether tasting the solution the eggs were in was okay, so we looked up the reaction products and researched the one that wasn't familiar, calcium acetate. Safe enough, we decided. The next day, when the eggshells were fully dissolved, I tasted them (we had one hard-boiled and one raw; I cooked the raw one first) and, based on my review of the experience (yuck; vinegary, but not in a pleasant way), P decided not to taste them.
• We all read some Magic School Bus chapter books this week, about insects (predation, digestion, spider webs, compound eyes, speedy motion, and more) and electric storms (T only for this: cloud formation, types, and evolution; buildup of charges at top and bottom of a storm cloud; formation of hail).
• P and T watched Magic School Bus videos about decomposition, eggs, and dinosaurs.
• One day when he tired of Minecraft, T sat down with me to look at our big anatomy book. He wanted to see the heart, then the brain. We looked at the cardiac cycle and at the brain's sensory, motor, and language functions. Each time we saw a brain region on a diagram, I'd touch T's head in the corresponding place. He was telling me about some of the areas himself before we were done, so he was clearly engaged.
• In conjunction with our atomic-shell diagrams, P and I looked at the Periodic Table of the Elements and talked about why it has the shape it does (outer electron shells accommodate more electrons, so more different elements go by as you fill them) and what it would look like if it didn't have to fit on a standard-shape piece of paper (lanthanide and actinide series inserted, making the table much wider).
• Inspired by another 6-second science fair bit, P drew an arrow and wrote her name backwards (mirror-image) on a small piece of paper, and we held it behind a glass full of water, seeing how at short distance it magnified, while at greater distances the images were reversed. That called to P's prior experience with magnifying glasses.

Math and Spatial Skills

• Both kids did a lot of building in Minecraft this week. One day I went to the basement for maybe half an hour to deal with laundry, and when I came back, both kids had built rather impressive roller coasters with mine carts! They spent hours over the next few days embellishing these, adding new shapes and underground sections, adding powered track sections to boost speed, playing with block foundations to adjust slope, and so on.
• Both kids have also been experimenting with TNT in Minecraft. Simple experiments result in near-simultaneous explosions of multiple blocks, leaving a very satisfying hole in the ground. After watching a video about TNT cannons, P built one, using redstone wiring to produce a simultaneous explosion of a ring of TNT blocks, propelling her character (on a stone block in the center of the ring) straight up, well above the clouds. They do these tricks in Creative mode, so their characters don't get hurt by the explosions and so they'd have a ready supply of TNT.
• T asked me one evening, while I was reading to him, to say what the page number said. It was 79, and he seemed amazed it was so high. In the days since, I've asked him about a few two-digit page numbers, and he has interpreted them correctly. For 41, he also thought about what it would be if the digits were reversed, but he needed me to tell him that 14 was fourteen.
• P and I made a number line for T from string and construction-paper rectangles. It goes up to 21, which is his favorite number. We used paper color and other markings to facilitate skip-counting of evens, odds, fives, and tens. T likes it and has gone to it spontaneously a couple of times to count out loud and look at the numbers. We hope this will help him through the teens, which are a little hard to remember how to write, and where he usually skips a number or two when counting out loud.
• When P and I were talking about constructive and destructive interference of light waves, we discovered she didn't really know what negative numbers were. So I drew a number line that went both ways and showed her how to add positive and negative numbers on it. She quickly grasped this, so I also showed her subtraction of positive and negative numbers, both on the number line and in algebraic notation. She got it easily. We also looked a bit at algebraic notation for variables (e.g., the many ways to write multiplication), and how to write and evaluate simple expressions with variables. During this whole process, I could see P getting excited about these concepts in the same way I remember doing when I first learned them. It was so much fun to share concepts I love and have P share the feeling! 

Reading and Writing

• We finished reading out loud the Olympian Gods section of D'Aulaire's Greek Mythology. Both kids still listen closely to this.
• We checked out an e-book version of Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos from our local library. P was delighted that we could do this late in the evening, when the library was closed, and without going anywhere. It's a book about the daughter of two Egyptologists who own a museum of antiquities in London, around 1900. We get snapshots of life in that period, bits of the political scene in Europe, bits of Egyptian history and mythology, and some British slang along with this interesting story. P was also delighted to see that my new Kindle has a built-in dictionary lookup function, so if a word is in its downloaded dictionary, we can just look it up as we're reading. There's a lot of good vocabulary in this book, so I pause to check if I think a word is unfamiliar to the kids, and give them a definition or explanation if they need it. Sometimes they ask, too, about unfamiliar words. Interestingly, Theodosia does not go to school -- her parents don't pay much attention to her, and when she didn't return to boarding school after a dreadful term there, they didn't force the issue. She is now an autodidact, well versed in Egyptian writing and magic from her readings in the museum library, and learning as she goes about Egyptian history.
• P read quite a bit of Theodosia out loud as I was giving T a bath this week. I haven't heard her read out loud much recently (though she does read to T beyond my hearing sometimes), and I was pleased to hear her fluency and expression as she read.
• UnschoolerDad has been reading more of The Burning Bridge to P.
• See Science for Magic School Bus reading this week.
• A local unschooler, considering buying tablets for her kids, asked about the differences between Minecraft versions for PC and tablet. P knows a lot about this, so she helped me write an email about the most important differences. The information was very useful to the person asking the question.
• When we were having sandwiches for lunch with my parents visiting, and I was dealing with dietary differences for many people, P wrote a list of what she would like on her sandwich so I wouldn't get confused.

Social Studies: History/Geography/Civics/Economics

• See Reading for what some of what we learned this week in history.
• UnschoolerDad was on a business trip this week, so T and I took a look at our world map to see where he was compared to where we were.
• One one longish drive home, P asserted that she already knew the rules of the road and just needed to learn how to drive when it was time. I asked if she would like for me to quiz her on that, and she said sure. So I did, and it turned out she still had some learning to do, though she has absorbed quite a bit. She enthusiastically talked laws and defensive driving with me the rest of the way home.
• On the 50th anniversary of MLK's famous speech at the March on Washington, I didn't get it together to show them the speech, but at bedtime we talked some about what people were fighting for, and I sang them "We Shall Overcome" as one of their bedtime songs.
• In connection with checking out e-books, P wondered why only one person could check out a given copy of an e-book at one time. We talked about the economics of publishing, and how publishers who have been making money on printed books still want to make money on library books (which they do, since the books can be lent to only one person at a time and eventually wear out and require replacement), and how those publishers have made e-book deals with libraries that mirror those for print books, because they're afraid they'll lose their revenue stream otherwise. We also talked about how, technically, e-books could be much more widely available, and how this would be desirable from the consumer's point of view, but might lead to problems for publishers.

Everything Else: Art, Music, PE, and Miscellaneous Learning and Exploration

• With UnschoolerDad out of town and calling us most evenings, both kids have finally learned how to carry on a conversation on the phone! It's easy to forget how weird this situation is for little kids. It requires not only thinking about a person they can't see, but also thinking a little about that person's perspective: what would they be interested to hear about? What can they sense, and not, about your surroundings as you talk with them? P was pretty good at it already, but she's getting better, too.
• P started a new weekly gymnastics class and is enjoying it.
• T has been making good use of our mini-trampoline, jumping often when he has excess energy to burn.
• I've been playing guitar and singing at bedtime most nights. P has been joining in as she learns songs, and also starting to harmonize a bit.
• With my parents visiting, we rented a canoe and a paddleboat at a nearby lake and went boating for an hour. We saw little trees that had grown in the spring and early summer while the lake was empty, some of them now far out in the lake. We saw fish jumping and speculated about why there are many bubbly places in the lake -- oxygenation for the fish, perhaps, or maybe that's where the lake gets filled? P learned a little about how to cooperate in paddling a canoe.
• P did some nice drawings while I read to her, working on shading to produce some three-dimensional effects in drawing hair in particular.
• T came up with an original (I think) idea in Minecraft. Since some blocks stick to others sideways while others fall when unsupported beneath, he built a tall shaft for crushing things (chickens, mostly). It has windows on one side for putting in whatever he wants to crush. He puts a sticky stone block with some sand blocks on top of it near the top of the shaft, and then he destroys the stone block so the sand falls all the way down.