Finally!

We woke up in the middle of the week to this:

It was not a lot of snow, only about an inch, but Tiger had been waiting for this snow for two years (we didn't get any snow last winter), so he was adamant that he was to play outside.  Being the understanding and sympathetic mother than I am, I let him have his way.  Tiger is a lucky boy, considering what some school children have to contend with given the same weather.

After an hour or so outside, Tiger came in to warm himself up with a hot drink while reading a few books to get himself in the right frame of mind to start our lessons.

 

While we have done a little study on snow before, I figured it wouldn't hurt to do a little review,

before we did a little experiment on insulation whereby we wrapped one same-sized ice cube in a different material (e.g. flannel, paper bag, cling film, baking paper, aluminium foil, etc).

We checked for signs of melting (which would reveal how well the particular material is for insulation) every 15 minutes.  At 30 minutes we saw this:

After an hour, we saw this:

Our result showed that the three least insulated materials are:

1. aluminium foil
2. nappy bag (big surprise!)
3. dish cloth

The materials that provided the greatest level of insulation are:

1. brown paper bag (another surprise)
2. flannel
3. J-cloth

Even though we had very little snow this time, some parts of the country has been experiencing snow storms since the beginning of 2015:

Across the Atlantic, the east coast of America was also experiencing blizzards, on a much larger scale:

The various degrees of snow conditions got us curious to find out the differences among sleet, hail, and snow.  It is quite amazing to know that all of these different conditions came from the same source, water:

As we learned about avalanches from the documentary above, we did a simple experiment to show how larger objects in an avalanche will tend to drift to the top of the heap.

We put several small objects of different shapes and sizes (e.g. a lego man, a round lego shape, a red lego rectangle, an eraser, a small metal stick) into a jam jar and poured rice into it to cover the objects.  As Tiger shook the jar each time, different objects surface to the top, except the metal stick which never did.

As the snowfall was such a rare event and was the first time that it has settled enough to allow for some play, we decided to put it in our Calendar of Firsts for the week as "first settled snowfall" and drew a little snowflake to mark the occasion.

There are many different ways to draw snowflakes but we really like Shoo Rayner's friendly and approachable style so we have been learning a lot from him lately, including how to draw a snowflake easily:

This was followed up by the end of the week with my first sighting of our grey squirrel.  Tiger had seen the squirrel since the beginning of the year, but I hadn't.

That probably just means that I haven't been looking out of the window as much as he has, because the grey squirrel is a regular visitor to our garden.  If you're wondering why my squirrel looks more like a red squirrel than a grey squirrel, that's because I was practising using crayons by following the instructions here:

This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 2/3/15
2. Virtual Refrigerator
3. Fininshing Strong #41
4. My Week in Review #23
5. Collage Friday: Our "Classically Eclectic" Homeschool Week
6. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one in which I'm hoping for an early spring
7. Science Sunday: Muscles and Movements in Other Organisms
8. Keeping Company: February Link-Up

When Storms Get Too Much

For some reason, I had never understood the difference between a tornado and a hurricane, until now when we actually look into the matter.  I knew that both have something to do with strong winds and rain, but that was about it.

The other thing that I was very confused about was the difference between cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes.  It turns out that they all refer to the same thing; the only difference lies in where the wind originates.

We did a few experiments to coincide with what we were learning.

The first experiment has to do with seeing how wind movement varies depending on where it is within the hurricane.  What we did was basically to tie a paper clip to a piece of string then drop the paper clip into the outer edge and inner part of a small glass bowl of whirlpool.

Our bowl is too small so our observation only lasted a few seconds.  However, we did observe that the paper clip moved much faster when dropped in the inner parts of the whirlpool compared to when it was dropped on the edge.

The next experiment has to do with testing different strengths of wind using a "wind tunnel" made out of a cardboard box.  We placed a few items made out of different materials (e.g. pewter, plastic, paper) and had a fan blow at them at three different strengths.

Wind strength 1:

Wind strength 2:

Wind strength 3:

Since changes in weather are ultimately caused by a change in air pressure, we decided to make a simple barometer.

The idea is that it should work like this:

We dutifully placed our homemade barometer and measuring strip outside to wait for the changes in atmospheric pressure, only to find that the strip would not stay on outside due to exposure to the wind and rain.  It is no good placing the barometer indoors because the air pressure inside is not going to change enough to cause the marker to change.  In view of that, we made another barometer, this time placing it inside a bigger jar.

The reason for placing the barometer in a bigger jar is to enable us to observe how the barometer actually works by changing the air pressure inside the bigger jar by pushing and pulling on the balloon cover that enclosed the jar.

 We also learnt a fair bit about air pressure and its relation to temperature from the following documentary:

To understand the scale and destructive potential of a hurricane, we looked at what happened when Hurricane Katrina landed in New Orleans a few years ago:

This post is linked up to:

1. Science Sunday #14
2. Collage Friday: A Typical Week in Foundations
3. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with sunshine, emerging routines, and vocabulary cards
4. My Week in Review #22
5. Hip Homeschool Hop - 2/3/15
6. History and Geography Meme #152
7. Fininshing Strong #41 

Blow, Wind, Blow!

We decided to extend our weather observation from last week by looking more closely into various aspects of the storm more closely.

First, we looked at wind.

Then we opened the two (I don't know why we have two, but we do) boxes of weather experiment kit and built a better rain gauge than the one we made last year, as well as two anemometers.

Why two anemometers?  Well, because the manual one is obviously not good enough so we had to build a fancier, bulb-lighting one.

We soon realised that the low-tech one is a lot more practical, because we could stick it in the middle of the lawn and watch the wind cups turn while we had to run out into the blistering wind to put the bulb-lightning one to good use... The lesson for us is obviously not to be seduced by flashing lights.

We then looked into the very sudden, few minutes of strong wind and thunderstorm last week and found that it might have been part of the mini tornado that took place in Harrow, Wales, and Cornwall.

Now, that explains the strange weather!  Even though UK does not normally get the full strength tornadoes like the ones in America,

we have been getting increasing numbers of them year-on-year.  Apparently, there was a sizeable occurrence in Birmingham ten years ago:

So what causes a tornado to form?

 The following documentary does a really good job of explaining it:

Inspired, we conducted a few very simple experiments to help us understand convection currents (the interaction between warm air and cold air that happens in thunderstorms) a little better.

For the first experiment, we filled a glass tray with tap water.  When the water is completely still, we put a few coloured ice cubes at one end and pour a few drops of red food colouring at the other end.  The aim is to observe that the warmer colour (red) rises to the surface of the water while the colder colour (blue) sinks to the bottom.

The second experiment is to simulate the convection cycle to show the movement of warm and cold water that is similar to the interaction between air masses with different temperatures.

Basically what we did was to fill a large jar with cold water, and a plastic cup with very hot water mixed with red colouring.  The plastic cup was then covered with cling film which was held in place by a rubber band.  The plastic cup was lowered carefully into the jar before a slit was made to the cling film with a sharp knife to allow the coloured water (hot) to rise through the cooler water.

After a while, the hot water will cool down and move back closer together, then drift down through the larger jar's water.  This movement shows that hot air rises and cool air falls.  It's very straightforward, isn't it?

Just for fun, we made our own super-easy-to-make mini tornado in a jar.

This post is linked up to:

1. Science Sunday: What You Have Been Doing
2. Hip Homeschool Hop - 1/27/15
3. History and Geography Meme: Feudalism and Manorialism
4. Collage Friday: A Typical Week in Foundations
5. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with sunshine, emerging routines, and vocabulary cards
6. My Week in Review #22

Water, Water Everywhere

It is still raining quite a bit where we are.  We have been measuring the daily rainfall using our homemade rain gauge.

The amount of rainfall that we get is nothing compared to some parts of the country.  It started with heavy rainfall in December, building up to floods occuring in many parts of the country by early January.  We have been looking at the photographs here, here, and here to see the damage and inconveniences caused by having too much water.

To get to the bottom of things, we decided to find out what might have caused the extreme weather, specifically the factors that might have led to flooding:

Naturally, being near a river is going to be a concern at a time like this.  However, river flooding doesn't necessarily have to become hazardous, if proper planning and management have been done to make use of the sediments deposited by the flood water, as we have learnt two years ago in world history -- where the flooding of the River Nile was a major source of the fertiility of the lands around it.  Below are some phots of the experiment we did to illustrate the flooding of the Nile leading to fertile land.  We used planted grass seeds in an aluminium tray, flooded the "river", and waited for a week for all the water to be absorbed and the grass to grow.

The Thames is a tidal river, hence very susceptible to flooding.  Having London flooded would be extremely costly, hence the Thames Barrier has been very much in use these few weeks to make sure that doesn't happen:

Apart from rivers being a potential source of flooding, coastal flooding can be lethal too:

The force of water can be illustrated by making a simple water wheel using plastic cups and paper plates.  It works but isn't very robust, being made out of paper plates and all, so the rain made it very soggy after a few hours.  Nonetheless, it served its purpose before it disintegrated.

It seems that the trouble is going to persist for a while yet...

For anyone who is living in a high flood-risk area, it's probably a very good idea to learn from here all about how to prepare for a potential flood, what to do during and after a flood, and how to manage flood risks.  Alternatively, much can be learned from books too.

This post is linked up to:

1. Geography and History Meme: Ancient Egypt activities for kids
2. Entertaining and Educational - Hasty Pudding
3. Collage Friday: The Key to Successful Homeschool
4. Weekly Wrap-up: The One with the Love Languages, Too Much Castle, and New Curriculum
5. Homeschool Mother's Journal {January 25, 2014}
6. Science Sunday: What Do Your Students Need to Know Before High School - Biology
7. Hip Homeschool Hop - 1/28/2014

It's Not Very Clear...

A few mornings ago we woke up to a thick fog.

It wasn't just in our area.  It seemed that most of the country was shrouded in the fog.  Since it was everywhere, we decided to find out more about it.  We were surprised to find there to be so many different classifications of fogs, and determined that what we had must have been a freezing fog (as opposed to a coastal fog), which is related to the supercooled water concept that we learnt last week.  It might well have been a radiation fog, had it not been for the accompany feathery ice crystals that we saw on the window pane in the morning.

We have driven in thick fogs before so we remember what the hazard that the fog can present.  Therefore, it is good to heed the advice of the Met Office, even though what they're telling us is very much a matter of common sense.

There are two types of warnings for a fog:
(1) yellow

(2) amber

This post is linked up to:

1. Nature Study Monday: Izula-Bullet Ant-Paraponera Clavata, aka: Scary bugs!
2. Hip Homeschool Hop - 1/21/14
3. Entertaining and Educational - Hasty Pudding
4. Collage Friday: The Key to Successful Homeschool
5. Weekly Wrap-up: The One with the Love Languages, Too Much Castle, and New Curriculum
6. Homeschool Mother's Journal {January 25, 2014}
7. Science Sunday: What Do Your Students Need to Know Before High School - Biology

The Italian Experience - The Disaster

For some reason, we did not study the infamous eruption of Mount Vesuvius when we studied Ancient Rome.  Luckily, we get to do it this time round because of Marco Polo.  Who would have guessed?

We started by reading many books about the event in Pompeii:

 

This was followed by several cross-curricula activities from this book, which included learning about Pliny the Elder's route (geography), reading a play version of the story of Pliny the Elder as narrated by his nephew (comprehension, drama, reading), and labeling parts of a volcano (earth science).  The more hands-on activity was the making of a topologic map, 3D model of Mount Vesuvius.

Tiger used some terracota-coloured clay and worked layer-by-layer using the copy of the topologic map provided in the book.  The final result:

Originally, I only intended to watch one documentary, but we ended up watching three different ones to get a really good understanding of the event from different perspectives:

With a good understanding of the event, we were able to better appreciate our visit to the Life and Death: Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition that is currently showing at the British Museum.

While we were there, Tiger attended a full-day workshop related to the exhibition.  At the workshop, the children were introduced to several re-enactors who took on different roles as people who were in Pompeii on that fateful day in AD79: Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, a freed slave girl, a rich merchant, a priestess, a slave.  Through their interaction with these different characters inside the exhibition hall, the children were given good insights into life in Pompeii at that time, how people lived, their different roles, and how the Roman societal hierachy was organised.

We enjoyed our visit to the British Museum so much that we are going to relive the experience on the big screen next week!

This post is linked up to:

1. June Culture Swapper 
2. History and Geography Meme #78
3. Hobbies and Handicrafts - June 14
4. Collage Friday - Try Not to Destroy Their Imagination
5. Weekly Wrap-Up: Camp Week
6. Science Sunday: Happy Father's Day
7. Hip Homeschool Hop - 6/18/13