Spring Weather and Science Lessons.

What a week last week was! Ray was sick with some sort of bug. Wednesday he hit his head, Thursday he felt awful- fever, stiff neck. Basically, all the signs of meningitis. We had a quick jaunt to the hospital after doctor prescribed migraine medicine didn't work. We had to rule out bacterial meningitis. Thankfully, it was not bacterial or viral. They gave Ray some sort of anti anxiety medication that was supposed to double as a muscle relaxer for his raging headache and inability to move his neck. What the meds did, however, was turn Ray into a zombie who basically spent until Sunday morning sleeping. He quit taking them and ended up with chills and uncontrollable shivering like he was coming down off a drug. It was awful. Needless to say, no one got much school or work done those days he was sick. Trevor has been mildly sick, I think, as he's been more tired than usual and complaining about a mild earache. So I haven't been pushing him too hard. Today was our first day actually getting something besides one subject done a day. I'm not trying to set a killer pace. We'll homeschool year round and get this.. we only have 2 more units (that's about 2 weeks) left of his phonics program! Then he will officially be finished K12's K phonics program and will move onto Grade 1, where he will learn long vowels and other, phonics stuff. His K curriculum taught him all the letter sounds (we whipped through those knowns), blends like "th", "sh", "ck" etc. He's learned when to add "s" or 'es" onto the end of the word. he's learned -all and a few other two letters endings (-zz, -ss, etc). He's learned a billion sight words and just finished up the unit on compound words. For K, that's pretty intensive, and the main reason I started with K12 K level phonics even though he was in kindgergarten last year.

So that excites me the most! My little man has learned to read! It's very cool that he not only learned that; he learned it at home! We're about half way through his math book, that's a lot tougher. He struggles with math concepts.

We're still mummifying our chicken. He should have 1-2 more weeks of curing before he is done.

So today we did Chemistry. We haven't done chemistry in a couple weeks. Mainly because of the lack of red cabbage at the grocery store. It seemed it was always out when I needed it. Our latest experiment had us using red cabbage juice as an indicator to test for acids and bases. I finally found the red cabbage and made the indicator by boiling the shredded cabbage in distilled water for 15 minutes. The result was this dark purple liquid. So we started our experiment. I'll warn you, the kids are EXHAUSTED in the pictures. It was close to 70 today and so we spent a great deal of playgroup and this morning outside. We came home and the kids watched a Scholastic video from the library and then came up for science. Trevor hasn't been sleeping well. So everyone was a little subdued for the lesson.


Smiling for a photo before we start. I'm as beat as the kids, so sorry some pictures are not the best focus.


Tasting White Grape Juice. Trevor does not care for many juices except OJ. He found the grape juice sour. Rachael disagreed and found it sweet. I love how she's rubbing her chin like "hmmmm...."


In the first step of the experiment, Trevor hypothesized whether or not he thought each liquid would be sour or not sour. He had: white grape juice, grapefruit juice, lemon juice (not lemonade), mineral water, milk, tap water, alkaselzer water and baking soda water. After he guessed, he tasted and marked his results. We compared those results with his hypothesis.


Ack! That lemon juice is too sour! heehee. Trevor had to run and spit in the sink. He's melodramatic like that. heh.


Pouring the cabbage indicator into the liquids to see what will happen. Unfortunately, not all our results matched what we were supposed to get. Our mineral water did not change with the indicator, nor did the grape juice.


It looks like we're going to dye easter eggs, doesn't it? All our liquids after the indicator had been added.


Trevor's results. The white grape juice, the antacid and the mineral water were all supposed to change. The juice was supposed to turn pink, the mineral water was supposed to turn light purple and the antacid was supposed to change blue. Go figure. I have no idea why they didn't change, maybe we used a different brand or something. I used regular bottled water for mineral water and I think I used the wrong thing- the book said the mineral water would taste "bad but not sour". Aquafina has minerals added but I find it sweet. So I think mineral water is something different than bottled water with minerals added to enhance the taste. Hm. Something for some other science lesson.