Week 7- Science is the Best

 Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.

— William Arthur Ward

Math: Rounding, multiplying and dividing with bigger numbers, and the order of operations.

 He also played on Prodigy.

LA: Worked on spelling more sight words, and reviewed the "rabbit rule".  He also did creative writing.

A1 did Exact Path a couple of days for math and language arts, too.

Science: A1 worked more on his nature notebook; we looked at more changing leaves and noted changes in temperature.

We saw nature up close and personal with Bambi just chilling in the backyard.

Ate all my flowers, now he's ready for a nap.

Moving indoors, we conducted a slimy experiment. I think viscous things are pretty fun to play around with. We did a Mel Science chemistry experiment using colored and heated sodium alginate which the kids squirted into a cool CaCl2 solution. This turned the liquid (sodium alginate in water) into a semi solid worm. Well, the casing on the worm was a semi solid, if you squeezed too hard, as the kids found out, it's still a liquid on the inside.

Left- Dropped the liquid from above the water
Right- pushed liquid out of syringe under the water

But wait, there's more. We have a science fair coming up. A1 conducted a behavioral experiment with multiple dogs to find the winning treat. Stay tuned for his presentation.

Speaking of the winning treat, this week, we answered the very important question of what is the best tasting milk chocolate bar.

Over the summer the kids blind tested Heresy's, Feastables, Dove, Great Value, and Hershey's symphony bar. Great Value and regular Hershey's were rated among the lowest, while Hershey's symphony bar came out on top. But there was one, hard to find, chocolate that was "out of stock".  However, after extensive searching, the long awaited test was able to commence. We present: The Symphony Bar vs Cadbury Chocolate.

The panel of judges (aka kids) were spilt, with the boys preferring the Symphony bar and the girls preferring the Cadbury bar.

Seeing the split was down gender lines, I decided to look more into if studies had been done on gender and taste differences. Turns out, there have been. This one also took into account the age of participants. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10605808/

Simply put, younger people have a better sense of taste than older people and women have a more keen sense of taste than men. This could be attributed to the fact that, in general, they have a better sense of smell, too.

 What's your favorite chocolate?

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History: We read though the Declaration of Independence and talked about why the people of America wanted to be free. For fun, we watched National Treasure. (No, it's not scientifically or historically accurate.)

A1 also learned about the Articles of Confederation, why they failed, what a constitutional convention is, and how our current constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation. Way to go, Madison!

Art: A1 made A2 a coloring book, and he started to make a homemade chess board.

Just need to color squares

A1 finished out Minecraft and chess club for the month and continues with piano lessons.

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A2 went to Joy School and library story hour. We continue to read.

Her and a friend colored for nearly an hour at the library.

When we got home, she cut out her creations and taped them up on her wall, all by herself.

She put the sun up high because it's high in the sky.

We also had a dance party.

And baked cookies.