Sunday, December 4, 2011

Ancient China, paper, and oxygen

I have absolutely loved learning about ancient China with my boys.  They were masters of invention!  Compasses, wheelbarrows, boat rutters, kites, gunpowder, and even the printing press!  (but there were thousands of print characters, so it never really caught on, so I'll still give the credit to Gutenberg)

And of course, they invented PAPER.  This was my favourite activity that we've done so far.  I made paper years ago, but this time around I got a wonderful kit from Arnold Grummer that worked so well, that even Hyrum made wonderful paper with hardly any help. Maxwell of course made a few pages...




It ended up to be GORGEOUS paper with bits of flower pedal fibre embedded throughout.

We also painted some paper lanterns.  It was only AFTER we did this activity that Maxwell and I read in one of the books how lanterns were used during the new year for luck.



For Preschool...yes I did preschool this week, I was just a bit too frazzled until now to do it again....we learned about the letter "f" and put on wings to fffffly.  Hyrum loves the songs and learning more and more.  So rewarding.



And for science we learned about air, namely the oxygen in the air.  We reviewed air pressure (which was easy to do after our hurricanes winds last week that blew down our fence!) and air displacement.



And we taked about oxygen.  We made oxygen from yeast and hydrogen peroxide.  We showed how fire went out with out oxygen.  We showed how elements in fruit left and combined with oxygen to "rust" but didn't if it was covered in citric acid.  We did a few other things that taught us about oxygen, I just can't remember right now.



For field trip we had a Christmas party.  I love this time of year!

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