It has been sub-zero temperature here in England where we are for the past two weeks, and we were warned by the weather man yesterday about the coming snow, so we have all been watching out for the first sign of snow with eager anticipation.
We saw the first flurry of snow at 10am. Tiger was all excited but he managed to stay indoors until he has had his lunch before going out. During the wait, we managed to get some maths problems and Chinese done. Tiger also spent some time making paper sculptures of castles as part of his battle scene.
After lunch, we went outside to catch some snowflakes on a piece of black card to look at them under a magnifying glass.
After that, I didn't have the heart to keep Tiger indoors anymore so he spent most of the afternoon playing in the snow.
Our study of Robin Hood carried us through two kings in England: Richard I and his brother, King John. It was interesting to see how these two brothers seemed to be vastly different in terms of personalities and characters.
As always, different historians have differing views on the same man, although all agreed that he was not the best of rulers. We learned a fair bit from watching different clips, comparing the information we gathered from the episodes on King John on this DVD, to the information from the following clip:
I don't restrict Tiger's reading to only books that are specifically on King John, so he has been reading on the broader topics of medieval England:
Tiger has also been using his quill pen to write letters to his grandmother.
We also ate the Pumpes (Meat Balls). The dish doesn't look like much, but it is absolutely delicious.
For field trips, we chanced upon Bradford-on-Avon Tithe Barn one day, which was shut when we were there but we had a good look around outside.
We then decided to go out into the garden and look for signs of animals preparing for winter, by turning over big stones, flower pots, looking behind the ivy... etc.
Not much luck, except for a few earthworms and slugs under some rotting pieces of wood...
Although we know that there is a 3-feet grass snake living somewhere behind/under the shed, I was certainly not going to disturb it. We then came back into the house and learned about the winter behaviour of the animals that we have seen around here:
To understand how animals insulate themselves in the winter, we conducted a few experiments on hibernation science.
For the first experiment, we used the following materials:
Materials: a bucket of ice water, petroleum jelly, two plastic bags, a rubber band
Tiger put his hand in one of the bags while I spread a thick layer of petroleum jelly on the bag before putting the second bag over the first, and securing both bags in place with the rubber band.
Then the fun begun. First, Tiger submerged his bare hand into the cold water and managed to hold it in there for 40 seconds.
Next he put his insulated hand in and held it for 3 minutes 4 seconds.
That was a long time difference due to the extra insulation, demonstrating how animals keep warm in winter by either growing extra fur or put on extra fat by eating more in autumn.
We also verified for ourselves how difficult it is for animals to find food in winter due to frost or snow. The materials needed are a few pieces of fruit (we used chopped pineapple chunks) and an ice cube tray.
Put each piece of fruit in each cube of ice cube tray.
Smell the fruit and note how strong the smell is, and how delicious it smells.
Then put water into the cubes and put the tray in the freezer.
Once the ice cubes are formed, try to smell the fruit and note whether the smell is stronger or weaker compared to before. Then try to eat the fruit. You should find that the smell is weaker when the fruit is iced over, and much harder to eat. This explains the condition for animals finding food in winter, which is why we do what we can to feed our birds these days.
We also went outside to try out the best ways to stay warm:
We don't always have snow in winter where we live so while there is snow, we make the most of the learning opportunity presented right at our doorstep.
First we learned that the amount of snowfall looks more than it actually is, because snow contains trapped air. Tiger filled a glass with the top layer of snow, before levelling the top off with a ruler.
We started the experiment with a cup full of fluffy snow.
At the start of the experiment.
45 minutes later.
90 minutes later.
The difference between the water level at the end of the experiment and the amount of snow at the beginning of the experiment shows that snow contains mostly trapped air.
We also did a quick, low-tech review of the different states of matter and the corresponding processes that occur to make the changes, with Tiger giving me examples of materials in each state.
The next experiment is to demonstrate the difference in rate of fall between a snowflake and a raindrop using two balloons -- one inflated, the other not. Tiger dropped them at the same height, then explained what caused the difference in rate of fall, which he thought was due to different air pressure caused by different amount of air contained within each balloon.
I thought he might have a point there, but the explanation given in the
book we use says that the difference is due to different surface areas
exposed to friction in the air.
The movement of snowflakes in the air and other interesting points about how snowflakes are formed can be found in the following clip:
No study of snowflakes is complete without mentioning Snowlake Bentley. We had read the book before when Tiger was in his preschool years, but now we are relooking at it again to recap:
We also watched a short film about him:
I dug out a set of snow crystal prints
that I had printed off and laminated into cards years ago. We admired
the intricacies of each snowflake and noted certain mathematical
characteristics: symmetry, hexagonal patterns.
We then attempted to cut out some paper snowflakes with the same hexagonal patterns. To make the folding easier, we decided to cut out circles first. It took Tiger a while to get used to handling the mathematical compass to draw different sized circles on the coloured papers:
The folding and cutting were quite simple, once Tiger figured out the instructions to fold the circle into sixths.
