You say Q, I say winter

Marketing, wild imagination, sheer boredom, whatever the reason, the Weather Channel has certainly added an amount of humor to the dreary winter months with their new naming system for winter storms. I remember a time, so many ages ago in my younger years, when a snow storm was just...winter weather. As for storm "Q", I hear that it did dump oodles of snow on some unsuspecting people, and I will grant that the four or five inches we got over a matter of two hours was rather exhilarating, but they didn't even cancel school.

So I'm wondering, is it possible that the national meteorologists were replaced with regional weathermen from places like South Carolina and Georgia? Because where I'm from, even a foot of snow in a day doesn't warrant a naming system. They just call it winter, and we're glad it's finally around this year.

Kitchen counter science: rocks, minerals, and crystals

That rock collection that's been taking up so much space on our nature shelf (and in drawers, and on the porch, and on the deck, etc.) is finally being put to good use, and there is much to be said for such a tactile, hands-on science subject as geology.

We studied rocks this week, with our fingers, our noses, and our eyes. We explored the scientific definitions of rock, mineral, and crystal, and the concept of the periodic table within these contexts. We grew rock candy and a salt crystal garden. We broke open a geode. We ran tests on a few mystery minerals to look at such defining characteristics as magnetism, reaction to acids, and hardness. We tried our hands at writing chemical formulas for a variety of minerals and gems.

It has been a week-long process so far, and is still underway. In fact, I suspect that we'll be exploring the subject at least until our rock candy is done growing. Most of the projects required only such things as we already had around the house, but there are a few pet materials that I'm glad we had:
A labeled rock and mineral collection (ours is by American Educational)
A good magnifying glass
Let's Go Rock Collecting, by Roma Gans
The Elements, by Theodore Gray
and a good copy of the periodic table (ours is a laminated placemat)
We also used the Young Scientists' Club Set 3, which was I was glad to have because we'd gotten for more than half off through Zulilly, but honestly it's not worth the full price.

Making rock candy and a salt crystal garden

four days later...

Taking notes and identifying minerals

Busting a geode...

Project 365 week 7

Tree of the gods

As in family tree. Of the Greek Gods.

This was a fun activity. We have a beautiful book, D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths, that we've been enjoying throughout our study of that beautiful civilization. It not only clearly describes the relationships between the various gods in writing, but also has a chart in the front for the more visual learners. Of course, the intricacies of godliness in ancient Greek culture is rather convoluted, seeing as there were several mortal, half-god men walking the earth at that time. Of course. Take Pythagoras, for instance. To simplify things we confined our study of the gods to the more literal of the group—those who had phenomenal powers, immortality, and jobs pertaining to the (then unexplainable) processes of the natural world.

Calvin's tree took a few days to create. We went online together to find sketches of the different gods, which we then printed for him to color. He picked out a blue poster board for the background. He made Gaia out of cut paper (green for her earth body, blue for the lakes and pools that form her mouth and eyes), and sketched, then cut the tree from postal paper before gluing everything down.

Love is in the air

Candy hearts, Red Hots, roses, chocolates in heart-shaped boxes, wearing red, wearing purple, s.w.a.k., ribbons and lace...what does Valentines Day mean to you?

From my own school days, I remember sitting at our kitchen table with a class list and a pen or pencil, painstakingly writing out the names of classmates on cards carefully selected for their innocuous messages (don't want that guy in the third seat back to think you actually love him). I remember being devastated the year that school was cancelled on the 14th due to winter weather. I remember spending hours designing the perfect card collecting device, which was inevitably made with a paper bag that would taped to the back of one's chair in the classroom.

Now, though, one can't pass out a card without attaching some additional token, usually in the form of candy. And nobody brings a paper bag for collecting their cards anymore. That would be blasphemy. We are part of two homeschooling groups this year; we still attend the same one that we joined last year at which Calvin takes a couple classes a week, and this year we've also started joining our little local group that meets in our library to visit and play games. The first one is more structured, the second more relaxed, but both did Valentines parties this year, which found Calvin designing, assembling, and addressing over eighty Valentines in all, and enjoying every minute of it. I refused to jump on the Second-Coming-of-Halloween bandwagon, so to speak, though. We handed out glittery pencils attached to downloaded and printed cards, as the shaft of Cupid's arrow to one group, and as an owl's tree branch to the other. Pinterest, again, was my friend.