Last Week of September

We had some fun adventures this week.

1.  Making butter in the cracker house at the Tampa Bay History Center.

2.  Homeschool History Day was the reason for going and here's their mystery object activity.

3.  Sensory bins for the little ones.

4. Floor sized compass rose to label with the cardinal directions.

5.  Our first family triathlon.  It was a mini triathlon with a 1 mile run, 3 mile bike, and 1/4 mile swim.  We completed it as a family with a new family best as it was the first one we've done.

6.  We finished our volcano lap book.  This was a great freebie from homeschool share available here.
 
And of course we did the regular stuff like the 3'rs too.

Volcano Science Projects

Today we did more volcano science projects from our volcano science packet by Ring of Fire Science.  My nephew, who is also 6, is visiting and really wanted to do school with us.

Ejecta from famous eruptions

Each cotton ball represents 1 cubic kilometer of ejecta (pumice and ash) from a famous eruption in history.  I usually use curriculum like cookbooks, which means I edit or change as necessary to suit us.  This project in the example had an additional eruption but the paper got very crowded and with the ages of the kids, simplifying a little seemed best.  You could do this project with any eruptions you're studying as long as you hunted down the relevant data.

We also did a layers of the earth project.  We did start the day with  a bit of reading on volcanoes and the Earth's layers.  Then we did a short layers of the Earth Montessori work.

 Our second project entailed creating the layers of the earth to scale.

Layers of the Earth

The favorite part of this project was using the compass. Neither of the boys had used one before and they enjoyed turning it and figuring out how to set the distance with the ruler.  It was a great chance to talk about radius and diameter of circles as well as the metric system of measuring.  Again I modified the project by adding more colors.

They're looking forward to more later in the week. 

Previously Unknown Volcano Erupts in Florida

First recorded eruption of Mt. Florida

Really!  Since we have no elevation here, this was the highest thing on the beach.

We're moving into volcano week so obviously we built the model explosion.

I used the recipe from Currclick's, Volcanoes:  Science Activities which fortuitously was a freebie several weeks ago.  I think the recipe was very safety conscious as I upped everything to accommodate the larger volume of this vessel and it made for a pretty inactive volcano.  I had brought 3 sets of materials so each kid could get one try and we went through them all just for this one.  I don't think our version endangered any tourists so find a better recipe and do try this at home.

We used (successful in the end recipe):

4 c. water
a couple squirts of dish soap
6 TBL baking soda dissolved in the water
food coloring (I was low on red but they didn't seem to notice the strong yellow lava)
6 oz. distilled vinegar