The eye and Middle East issues

Okay people. Yes the U.S. has been done with school for a while, but here in Canada we are going strong.  One more week of full throng in this house.  One. More. Week.

For science we learned about the eye. I was so happy I had my friend's help. I'm kind of burned out of  having to prepare lessons, so I wasn't prepared when we were supposed to start. An hour later, we were on track, but hey, all the kids were having a blast running around until then. It's all good.

One of the experiments we did, was to see how the lens turns everything upside-down. It was cool. You take a lens and tracing paper and look at a window, and the scene is projected upside-down. We did lots of other things, but I was sad I didn't have an eye to dissect. I was given cow eye, but I waited until science day to dissect it, and it went bad by then.

We learned about Dessert Storm for history. It was weird how little info I could find to share with my kids. I guess history doesn't think it was important, but as a little girl, I thought the gulf war was pretty darn important.

We burned oil to commemorate the war. It took awhile to start burning, but once it did, it BURNED. I was talking to them how oil fires should never have water put on it, when Maxwell spit on it out of curiosity. It was like a fire bomb went off! Crazy.

We also learned about 9/11. We talked about how the best way to conquer terrorism is to have hope, and we wrote hopes we had for the world on helium balloons that we let go. Maxwell hoped that they flew to the president (notice he didn't say "Prime Minister?"---yah, I'm so a U.S. mom who lives in Canada. Don't worry. I'll teach myself Canada politics/history and teach it to my kids---someday.)

Hyrum was really affected by learning about 9/11. He made his own activity. Without any coaxing from me, Hyrum made a whole New York skyline and made paper airplanes and threw them at the twin towers. I know that sounds barbaric, but I really think it was some coping mechanism for him because the whole thing was way too much for his emotional heart to handle. To make it a game made it unreal. I know that might not make sense, but that's what I think happened.

Moving on to math, Maxwell was very proud of himself this week. I introduce perimeters to him, and he found it really easy. I was quite proud of him as well.

And last but not least, it was Hyrum's BIRTHDAY!  We had a superhero party.  I was hoping this would be our end of year party, but it was not meant to be I guess.

See you NEXT WEEK!

The Brain, Tiananmen Square, and the Berlin Wall----with cows on the side.

For science we learned about the brain.  No brain to dissect. Whimper. It's hard to get one because of mad cow disease. So we did without.  Some highlights we checking our reflexes by seeing how fast we could grab a falling pole, and seeing if we could reteach our brain by writing with something besides our right hands.

For history we learned about Tiananmen square---so sad. Scary that the Chinese leaders basically said "If we make our citizens happy and healthy, they will never riot for their freedom again." Scarier still that they were right. We made funeral wreaths for Hu since it was Hu's funeral that began the revolt.

And I have loved learning about the Berlin Wall.  Did you know that the fall of the Berlin wall was an accident? The administrators never intended to have things happen the way they did. It was pretty much the power of the press and how, if so many people believe something is true, then it is.

We acted out the Berlin Wall, but it actually distressed Hyrum out to be stuck on one side of the house. His frown is real.  Maxwell's is fake.

There was the CUTEST book about the Berlin wall that even helped Daniel understand what happened.  It's called "The Balloon Sailors."  I remember watching a movie about this story when I was little. Simple book but powerful.

A quick update on math, Maxwell is doing awesome, and he can now count any amount of money quite well. For about a week, I would have some change in my pocket and if he could count it correctly, he could keep it. Not shockingly, Maxwell LOVED this. I have stopped doing this on such a regular basis.  I would go broke!

And last but not least WE BOUGHT A COW!!! Well, we bought equal shares into three cows, a few chickens and a goat!  I love having sisters-in-law who live in the country who are willing to share with us city folk!

The good and bad of science intervention; and the taste and smell senses

This week we learned about nuclear power plants and GMO. I am one paranoid person after a week like that.

We learned about nuclear power plants, because I felt the Chernobyl meltdown was an important part of modern history for my children to learn. I learned some things too.  Like how there's nuclear waste in the UK that will take 250,000 years before it will be safe.  250,000 years?!? What the freak! Or how the whole town of Pripyat is a no-go area for the next 20,000 years.  Hmmm. SCARY!

Anyway, we learned how nuclear waste can cause mutations, and made our own mutated creations like birds with three eyes or whatever. The boys just liked the play dough.  I don't give them it often (messy.)

We then learned about GMO. I have a sister-in-law who has very much educated her family about GMO and is trying to live a GMO-free life. Those cousins have already taught my kids a bit, so this was not new.  "oh yah, it's where seed's DNA is mixed with pig DNA to create something really bad for you." Maxwell said at the beginning of our GMO learning journey.

I tried to show why scientists do it by a demonstration.  I showed what corn normally looks like.  Bugs are eating it, there are weeds, and there's not that much food grown.

Then we changed the DNA of this corn. We made it bug resistant. We made it herbicide resistant. And we made it create more food which also meant thicker stacks.

Then we talked about the risks of the unknown and the actual history.  AHHH! I need to say that again. AAAAHHHHHHH! GMO scares the begeebees out of me!!!!  But really, when I think about trying to go GMO free in a country where they don't even label GMO, I get exhausted. My sister-in-law thinks there are only about ten crops she has to avoid (soy, corn, sugar, etc) and I don't have the heart to tell her that she's dreaming. I think her kids would hate me if I told her "no, actually. You're missing tomatoes, potatoes, strawberries, apples, etc."

I'm so glad that GMO is being brought to light. I have some Kellogg's corn flakes I bought from the states, and you can tell they are getting defensive.  On the back, it says how it's made from only four pure ingredients, and all their corn come from the fields of Nebraska and Kansas. They're trying so hard to sound pure...humph.

Serendipitously, there was a big world wide GMO march against Monsanto yesterday. Too bad I didn't find out about it until today :( It would have been perfect for our homeschool experience.


Anyway, moving on to science. We learned about smell and taste. What a yummy science day ;) These were some highlights: We had some food samples, and blindfolded ourselves and smelled them. We then blindfolded and plugged our noses and ate them.

We "mapped" taste buds by putting solutions of sugar, salt, lemon, and baking cocoa on our tongue where your taste buds of sweet, salty, sour, and bitter are.

And we also talked about how vision effects taste and ate some really green eggs.  Fun fun.

Women's Rights, Nelson Mandela, and the coolest bird field trip ever!

This week we learned about the feminist movement.  I read a really interesting article that went along with this.  It was one of those times when I kept thinking "ha ha, they don't have to listen to anyone else's agenda except for mine!"

We had a devotional about the Family proclamation to the world as part of learning about this.

I truly believe that there is a balance in women's rights, and the world has swung to one extreme. The boys didn't find it that fascinating, but I made a poster with a pendulum to represent this:

On one extreme side, the women is a slave to her husband and children, the boss doesn't give her money for all her hard work.

On the other extreme, the husband is the slave (I explained that this doesn't happen much, but some women might think that this is what should happen and get upset when it doesn't) The children are farmed out to daycare, and are not brought up by their own parents. Parents who both work are too exhausted to do all the housework and give proper attention to their kids. Women get the money while the men work (I explained that this doesn't happen, but that sometimes women get the job over the men just because they are women in an attempt to make sure they are not chauvinistic)

And then there's the happy medium.  If women work, then they get treated equally and get the fair amount of money. Men help with chores, women support their husband's jobs, but neither is a slave to the other. Fathers help raise the kids/take the burden of craziness at times, and mothers who choose to raise kids actually RAISE THEIR KIDS!

Not the brand of feminism you get in society.....I love homeschool.

On to Nelson Mandela. We learned about his life.  A good picture book about this is "Long Walk to Freedom" abridged by Wyk.  It's Mandela's own words.  We have already hashed out anti-segrigation, so the topic was nothing new, but it was still good to hear how problems are world wide, and not just in north america.

We made people chains of white and brown and combined them. I should have done something with rainbows instead.  I had forgotten that Mandela called South Africa the Rainbow nation.  Too late for creativity I guess.

And last but now least, we went on the coolest Field trip ever with the homeschool organization.  We went to Birds of Prey in Coaldale.  It was awesome.  We got to feed the ducks:

PET A BALD EAGLE!!! (yes, you read that right!)

And HOLD owls (too cool!)

McDonalds before and after, and lots of other stuff

Before I catch up on all that's been going on in our homeschool world, I had to post the results of our McDonalds experiment.  Awhile ago I wrote this post about how we learned about McDonalds and then we learned about preservatives. I took pictures of the McDonald's hamburger and fries, and I took photos of my homemade hamburger and fries. We then waited a month and studied the results. Check this out:

 These are the pictures when everything was fresh and new:

These are the pictures when everything was one month old:

Let's take a closer look at the one month old specimens, shall we?:

McDonald's

Homemade

Homemade

McDonald's

McDonalds claims that the reason their hamburgers are always perfectly preserved is because it dries out before bacteria can form, and any other hamburger and fries would do the same.  YAH RIGHT!

These burgers and fries were stored under the exact same conditions.

I will say this though: Two weeks into the experiment, we took a peek.  At that point the homemade burger and fries smelled REALLY bad. When you opened the box, you could practically see and feel spores pouring out.  It was very alive and disgusting.  On the one month mark, however, it was like the fungus had reached a stopping point. The food AND the fungus was all dried up.  But it did a lot of damage before it got to that point.

At first, my boys were "yuck, the homemade stuff is bad!" and I had to say "No, the McDonald's stuff is SO bad, not even the fungus will eat it!"

Haha, oh fun.


Okay, now for a semi-quick overview of the last few weeks.

Last science class we did, we learned about the ear. A couple highlights were the ear model:

It vibrated the ball when you clapped close to the drum part.

And the game where we changed the direction of sound, but you had to try to guess where sound was coming from:

For History, we wrapped up learning about segregation, by studying Martin Luther King Jr.  We watched his speech, a couple cute books were "Martin's Big Words" and "I Have a Dream" from Scholastic.  We drew pictures of dreams we had that would make the world better.  Maxwell kept inventing things that would not let out pollution.  It was quite cute.

I noticed something though; Hyrum didn't even notice the colour of people's skin before this unit, and now he does. All we did was talk about the evils of racism, but before we did, he didn't understand why there would even be such a thing.  Hummm.

We studied the space race (did you know they only spent 2 1/2 hours on the moon the first time?) and made our own lunar module out of marshmallows and toothpicks

And we learned about the Vietnam war, which of course includes the Hippy movement.  So we made tie-dye shirts of course! FUN!

AND it was Daniel's birthday, so we had a party and invited all the Daniels and Hyrums we live by (yes there are three Daniels and two Hyrums who live within a few blocks and are all friends.)

AND we went on vacation to the coast!  Nothing like hands-on learning, right?

We learned all about marine biology:

And how to fish:

Yes, that is Daniel thinking he could eat his fish right then and there.

Just another glimpse of my homeschool life!