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!