Rowan, His 7th Year in Review
Herbology 1 : Hogwarts Greenhouse One
Kala participated in her first Outschool course today, “Herbology & Magical Plants”. Here’s a recap: I learned about magical plants with many, many uses. We talked about cool plants like the Nightshade. The Nightshade is so pretty, it was used to dilate women’s eyes which used to be considered a beauty standard. As time passed, […]
Cloud Seeding
We have begun our day with a few subjects, ranging from the concept of the kobayashi maru exercise and politics, to the value of independent thought and questioning, to challenging status quo and “how we’ve always done it/thought about it”, to cloud seeding. Warm seeding Cold seeding The question we now have is, if the water […]
Operation Ouch!
We found a new series on CBBC today, “Operation Ouch!” Lils is loving it! It is actually gross enough I can hardly watch it. Operation Ouch! Operation Ouch! is a British 24-part children’s educational television programme about the human body, it shows what happens in A&E, what doctors sometimes have problems with and great experiments. […]
Electrons – Continuing Elemental Exploration
Always in Motion As you know, electrons are always moving. They spin very quickly around the nucleus of an atom. As the electrons zip around, they can move in any direction, as long as they stay in their shell. Any direction you can imagine — upwards, downwards, or sidewards — electrons can do it. Electrons […]
The Table of Elements
While we’ve discovered 118 elements in the physical world, there are 25 (or so) Minecraft elements. This is the beginning of our exploration. Elements as Building Blocks The periodic table is organized like a big grid. Each element is placed in a specific location because of its atomic structure. As with any […]
She Asked… Oil
She asked about oil, where it comes from and how it gets processed so we can use it in cars, etc.. We have spent most of today exploring how crude oil has formed, how it is extracted, refined, and finally delivered for our consumption. We’ve also talked about fracking for natural gas, the uses of […]
LED Robots
Today we built two robots and gave them sight! Lily worked on this project as her first project selection from her Tinkercrate and we had a great experience. She and I read through the directions, she assembled the components, and we set to work placing resistors, LED’s, and copper taping in a pattern on a printed […]
Circuitry, Electrons, Atoms, and Catfish
A post under development – as we work through her Tinkercrate (Circuits) this week: Today we read through the Tinkerzine, learning about the basics of electrons, the concepts of particles within an atom, the structure and concept of an atom, how electrons behave, the difference between a particle, an atom, and a molecule, and discovered […]