Archive for May, 2006
Published by
Joanne on
May 31, 2006
The other day, I posted some quotes I like. Here’s a few more.
“College isn’t the place to go for ideas.” ~ Helen Keller
“Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” ~ Mark Twain
“I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.” ~ Agatha Christie
Related Tags: unschooling, unschool, homeschooling
Published by
Joanne on
May 31, 2006
Wow, I’m almost up to 100 days. 
Here’s an update on what’s been going on in our corner of the universe.
Jacqueline went camping with her Brownie troop as an end-of-year celebration. She had a great time! They do all sorts of activites, they swim, BBQ, go hiking, etc. I also signed her up for a one week Girl Scout day camp in June. This was her third year in GS and she wants to go back in August when they start up again. She’ll be a Brownie for one more year and then move into Junior Girl Scouts.
Billy has been showing her how to dive into the pool. She’s like a fish. LOL!
She’s still very interested in space and has been working on her space book. She bought a binder in the flea market for 50 cents and she puts all her space papers in there with after I punch holes in it. I printed out some space stationary from online and she uses that to write her notes.
Shawna has been having a little bit of a rough time. This is the time of year they were removed from their original home and it happened to be 2 days before her 4th birthday. Her 11th birthday is next week and since she moved in, she’s very emotional around this time. I didn’t make the connection about it until last year and when I did, I spoke to her about it. She never realised it and she agreed that was probably why she was angrier and more sensative this time of year. Ever since I brought it to her attention though, I’ve noticed it has tapered off. I think just knowing that there was a reason for it, helped her. Billy & I are also very careful to not talk about her birthday to much in the weeks before and that has helped a lot also.
She is so into reading, more and more all the time. She’s just staring the series of Little House books by Laura Ingells Wilder. She’s crazy about that time period and we are working our way through all the Little House DVD’s from Blockbuster.
Cimion has been doing okay, except for this past week. Like Shawna, this is a emotional time for him. It was an abusive situation involving him that made the authorites permanently remove them.
He is still involed with his Yu-Gi-Oh league and loving it. He goes every Saturday and stays about 3 hours. There are about 25 kids that go and he knows a few of them from when he was in school.
Billy & I are still trying to find a contractor to do our bathroom. Billy gutted the whole room down to the sheet rock. hen the kids moved in we concentrated on the rest of the house and the backyard. In the process, our bedroom and bathroom have been sadly neglected. We started our bedroom last year (it is NOT a child-friendly bedroom. Adults only please!) and now it’s time for the bathroom.
That’s it for us.
Published by
Joanne on
May 30, 2006
Now that we have a gigantic world map on the wall in our family room, the kids are very interested in where the people that visit here are from.
Here’s the latest stats:
United States
Canada
France
United Kingdom
Australia
Germany
Philippines
Malaysia
Mexico
Japan
Singapore
Norway
Barbados
Bahamas
Netherlands
Luxembourg
New Zealand
Portugal
Peru
Hong Kong
Spain
Israel
India
Jamaica
Hungary
Austria
South Africa
Iceland
Korea, Republic of
Indonesia
Puerto Rico
Guatemala
Brazil
Greece
Published by
Joanne on
May 23, 2006
The homeschooling carnival is ready for viewing at Principled Discovery You’ll find my post on what unschooling is and isn’t.
(A carnival is a collection of blog posts on a related topic)
Published by
Joanne on
May 22, 2006
I told Billy about the soda/mentos geyser video I saw on the Adventures in Living blog. He, of course, thought it was very cool and came home with some cheap diet soda and mentos.
I went to Steven Spangler’s site for the details. He has a fantastic site, full of science experiments.
Experiment:
This activity is probably best done outside in the middle of an abandoned field, or better yet, on a huge lawn.
Carefully open the bottle of soda. Position the bottle on the ground so that it will not tip over.
Unwrap the whole roll of Mentos. The goal is to drop all of the Mentos into the bottle of soda at the same time (which is trickier than it looks). One method for doing this is to roll a piece of paper into a tube just big enough to hold the loose Mentos. You’ll want to be able to position the tube directly over the mouth of the bottle so that all of the candies drop into the bottle at the same time.
Results:
As you probably know, soda pop is basically sugar (or diet sweetener), flavoring, water and preservatives. The thing that makes soda bubbly is invisible carbon dioxide gas, which is pumped into bottles at the bottling factory using tons of pressure. Until you open the bottle and pour a glass of soda, the gas mostly stays suspended in the liquid and cannot expand to form more bubbles, which gases naturally do. But there’s more…
If you shake the bottle and then open it, the gas is released from the protective hold of the water molecules and escapes with a whoosh, taking some of the soda along with it. What other ways can you cause the gas to escape? Just drop something into a glass of soda and notice how bubbles immediately form on the surface of the object. For example, adding salt to soda causes it to foam up because thousands of little bubbles form on the surface of each grain of salt.
The reason why Mentos work so well is two fold: Tiny pits on the surface of the candy and the weight of the candy. Each Mentos candy has thousands of tiny pits all over the surface. These tiny pits are called nucleation sites – perfect places for carbon dioxide bubbles to form. As soon as the Mentos hit the soda, bubbles form all over the surface of the candy. Couple this with the fact that the Mentos candies are heavy and sink to the bottom of the bottle and you’ve got a double-whammy. When all this gas is released, it literally pushes all of the liquid up and out of the bottle in an incredible soda blast.
We just did it a few minutes ago in our yard and it went about 10′-11′!!! LOL!!! It was great! (We’re easily amused)
Try it and let us know how it goes!
