Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three. Confucius

09 July 2011

Mummifying Stuff

Hi Everyone,


Today we got the mummification process started on 5 apples and some chicken.


Pete, Jay and Freida peeled and cored the apples needed for the experiment to see which salt compound (bicarbonate of soda, sodium carbonate or table salt: individually and combinations of each) mummifies most effectively. Plus one control specimen with no preservative at all.


There was loads of mess....apple peels, cores and salts everywhere, but it was loads of fun, very hands on. Looking at and comparing the results will be interesting.


The chicken experiment was much more straightforward as we are not doing a comparison (couldn't stomach a control specimen after several weeks for that one!!!!).


We cleaned and salted the chicken.....just a few pieces for a science experiment here, wasn't keen to use a whole perfectly good chook that we wouldn't be eating :)


We will change the salt once a week or so and then embalm the flesh with oils and herbs from our garden....will keep you posted.


Besides that, we have been using the Family Math book, which is really useful. We have been doing some concrete numeracy exercises using household objects such as egg cartons and beans, and paper with dots.


The examples I've included are simply encouraging your child to put the corresponding number of beans (or whatever) in each cup of the egg carton (total 72 counters) as a basis of future exercises with number. The dots are for one to one correspondence and you remove the dots once the child is comfortable and place the counters onto blank paper.


Jay found the exercises easy and will move on next time, and Freida enjoyed a feeling of achievement, both finished their maths games happy and wanting to do more :)



We have also been using Silly Sentences by DK books. The children are having a lot of fun, and it is a good way to expose them to grammatical rules and reinforcing sentence structure while remaining creative.


This game not overly expensive, but if you would like a more personalized free version you can make at home, I discovered one
here at DLTK's Growing Together site.


Finally, a bit of an Oh Dear moment when Jay constructed a flying fox for our poodle....I was torn between commending his ingenuity and basic safety...so hopefully I covered both in the chat we had when I came across this one...gotta love those freerange homeschooling kids!

Talk Soon, Cynthia x