Chocolate Pilots and Seeing our own skin

I love the book "Mercedes and the Chocolate Pilot."

Not only is it the best children's book out there about the cold war, it is one of the best nonfiction children books ever. I seriously can not get through reading it without bawling.

We acted out our own chocolate pilot.  We made a few parachutes and attached candy to them.  I then got up high on the furniture and asked them questions about the real event, wiggled my out-streched arms and threw the parachutes.  We did this quite a few times.  As you can imagine, this was a success.

Serendipitously, during the LDS World Report which airs in the middle of conference sessions, they had a feature on Lt. Halvorsen. He happens to be a member of the church.  I started crying again.

Here's the link.

I love conference. Seriously the best education that my family can get.

To continue learning about the cold war, we read about the Cuban missile crisis and JFK's death.  I was being kind of lazy and said to Maxwell "K---Go and make a submarine and a boat out of legos to rein-act this." WOW!  Little did I know how much Maxwell would love doing this!   Maxwell is ALWAYS playing with legos, but I guess he likes direction.

By the way, some other good books about WWII were "One Candle" "Little Ships" and "Blueberries for the Queen."

Moving on to our science, we learned about the excretory system and skin.  For some reason it was a bit awkward to teach about pee, but it was just fine to teach about the digestive system.  Why is that?

Anyway, I ended up teaching mostly about skin that day. Probably the coolest part was looking through a microscope at our skin.  We had coloured our skin with a marker and ripped off the dead skin with some tape.  That sounds painful, but it was just normal tape.

We also learned about fingerprints.  That was a mess.