2016 Recap in Photos

Looking back at 2016, I realise that our life has changed dramatically.

While looking through these photos, I could not help seeing that homeschooling was indeed a lifestyle choice.  There are many aspects of homeschooling life that I miss, such as the ability to control our time and to engage in many uniquely interesting activities.  Nonetheless, we are where we are at this moment in life, and I am grateful for the opportunities that we have been given to enable a smooth transition from homeschooling to 'normal' schooling.

Everything from September to December zoomed past in a blur for me, so it is important that I keep the memories of what life was like for us, so that I may look back and recognise that I actually miss a lot of what was so good about our homeschooling life (I certainly don't miss the difficult bits!).

January
Highlights:

• Time: in nature, with family, with friends
• Sports: table tennis, climbing, archery
• Classes: Chemistry lab, model aircraft, zoology, English, History
• Studying fossils

 

February
Highlights:

• Time: eating out, drawing, cooking
• Sports: Climbing 
• Classes: model aircraft design, mask theatre, robotics, chemistry lab
• Studying prehistory and human evolution
• Field trips: Brooklands Museum, Colchester Zoo, National Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts

March
Highlights:

• Time: in nature, with family
• Classes: model aircraft, zoology, chemistry lab, programming
• Studying rocks and minerals
• Special event: jazz singing concert, short story writing submission

April
Highlights:

• Classes: model aircraft, zoology, chemistry lab, programming
• Studying rocks and minerals
• Field trips: House of Parliament, BBC Broadcasting House, London Aquarium
• Special event: singing concert, short story writing submission

May
Highlights:

• Time: in nature, with friends, with family
• Sports: table tennis
• Classes: physics lab, forest school, model aircraft design
• Studying art
• Field trips: Hertford Castle, Chartwell
• Special event: Universtiy Challenge in Chemistry (First Prize)!

June
Highlights:

• Time: in nature, with family, reading
• Classes: physics lab, programming
• Studying art, ancient history, geography
• Field trips: quarry, geological excavation site
• Special event: jazz singing concert

July
Highlights:

• Time: in nature, with family, with friends
• Classes: physics lab, astronomy, model aircraft design
• Studying art, insects, circuits
• Special event: jazz singing concert, model aircraft competition (First Prize), percussion concert

August
Highlights:

• Time: in nature, with family, drawing
• Classes: physics lab, programming
• Field trips: Cheddar Gorge
• Special event: 'geek' gathering

September
Highlights:

• Started attending school.
• Resumed mountain biking.
• Attended another 'geek' gathering.

October
Highlights:

• No photos!
• I was completely overwhelmed by work, and was practically just trying to survive it so did not even think to take any photos.

November
Highlights:

• Time: eating out, reading
• Field trips: Science Museum, British Museum

December
Highlights:

• Time: with family, climbing
• There's an obvious theme in this year's Christmas presents....

There is a definite lack of photos now that we spend most of our week day times apart.  I am still not used to not being the main participant of Tiger's learning journey.  It is a bitter-sweet feeling for me to see Tiger diving into his new phase of life so readily and successfully, and I am certainly glad that he is so adaptable to changes.  While I always knew that my homeschooling journey would eventually end, I was a little surprised to have it come so quickly and so suddenly.

Everything happens for a reason.  I am just so grateful that we are all in a good place right now, having the experiences that we are meant to be having for this season of our lives.

Wishing everyone a very happy 2017.

Much Ado About Slime

Halloween has always been associated with the darker archetypes of human consciousness.  As such, I often find that whenever I think of science activities related to Halloween, I will end up looking at something quite revolting or disgusting.

Our Halloween dinner.

We first tried out a science kit that I acquired at the charity shop for 50p, and did a few of the experiments from the attached booklet.  However, apart from the initial fun of stretching at the ready-made polmorphic slide, making our own slime ball, and playing a game of chase with the ready-made bouncy slime ball, I didn't think we have learnt much from the kit so I took it back to the charity shop.  Maybe the next person will have more joy with the kit.

We realised that we learn best by actually making the slime/gloop/oobleck ourselves, in the old-fashioned way, using the tried-and-tested cornflour and water mix:

It is one of those cheap-and-easy way to keep a child entertained for a long time, and to have a hands-on experience with the intriguing transformation of polymer chains, which certainly beats just reading about the properties of polymers from here and here.

From our little success above, we wanted to know what would happen if we scale up our experiment (from using 1 cup of cornflour to using 7 boxes of cornflour).  We filled two-thirds of our tub with oobleck, let it settle for a day and rest a glass bottle on its surface.  The glass bottle tipped to one side after a few minutes, but did not sink further into the mixture:

We then redid the test with a few marbles, one of which promptly sank into the suspension while the others took a little while longer to do so, but all eventually sank in and we had to fish them out with our fingers.

While the sinking of the materials was fascinating to watch, it was the fishing out part that really demonstrated the dilatant (the mixture moves slower when an external force is applied to it) quality of the suspension.

If we had a bigger container (such as a small paddling pool), we would have made a non-newtonian fluid pool that we could walk on, like the one shown below, but we understood the principle behind it from observing what happened to the marbles in the above experiment:

What other gloopy things can we make with cornflour and water?  Silly Putty, of course!  It is really a mixture of white glue, borax powder, water, and cornflour.

Borax is vital to the stiffness of the Silly Putty (as opposed to the simpler oobleck mixture) as borax facilitates the formation of cross-links among the polymers, which in turn creates longer/bigger and stronger/stiffer polymer chains.  Hence, the bounciness of the Silly Putty.

Finally, we turned out attention to the humble meringue, which is essentially made up of sugar and egg white.  Did you know that egg white is about 88% water?  The rest of it is almost all proteins (polymer).  The act of whipping the egg white unfolds and stretches the protein strands (the process is called denaturing), which gives rise to the network of bubbles we see.  As we further whip the egg white, the protein chains will overlap and form a long, stretchy surface, resulting in the stiff peaks that we look for when we make meringues.

We made four different batches of meringues to compare the differences in result when we made a slight variation each time:

1. egg whites at room temperature + cream of tartar + half a cup of white sugar
2. egg whites from the fridge + cream of tartar + half a cup of white sugar
3. egg whites at room temperature + cream of tartar + 1.5 cups of white sugar
4. egg whites at room temperature + half a cup of white sugar

The results are shown above:

1. the typical meringue: crunchy, slightly brown, with some air peaks, holds its shape well
2. similar to the results in (1) except that it has more air peaks
3. very white in colour, extremely crumbly, no air peaks, more like cookies, does not hold its shape well.
4. very sticky and flat, does not hold its shape at all.

Tiger writing his science report.

After such hard work (actually, our oven worked much harder than we did on that day with 4x90 minutes of non-stop baking), we relaxed by watching a documentary that explains how various materials such as ceramics, metal, and plastics work.


This post is linked up to:

1. Science Sunday #1: Chemistry Lessons
2. Hip Homeschool Hop - 11/4/14
3. Finishing Strong - Homeschooling the Middle & High School Years Week 36
4. Hearts for Home Blog Hop #90 
5. My Week in Review #12
6. Collage Friday - Hands On, Field Trip, and Fine Arts Learning
7. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one that was a lot less stressful

Playing (with the Bucky) Ball

As we've enjoyed our Kitchen Chemistry class, I bought this book as a extension to our current interest in chemistry.

The first we looked at was the buckyball, a soluble type of carbon molecule coded C60.

Here's what the man who discovered it has to say about it:

We tried to build a model of the buckyball, first with toothpicks and plasticine but they were too flimsy to stay up.

We then tried to construct the model using magnets.  That didn't succeed either because (1) we didn't have enough magnets to make 60 carbon atoms, and (2) we couldn't hold the molecular structure up long enough to form the ball shape.

Even though we did not manage to put the buckyball model together, we did get a good idea of its properties,

 as well as an interesting history leading up to its discovery:

 While learning about the properties of the buckyball from the good people at the University of Nottingham, we were led to watching the following video about graphene, which is essentially a one-layer, an-atom-thick size of carbon molecules.

The video made us feel a little better because we have at least managed to get a model of graphene, although we did it without realising what we were doing, or that the flat layer has a name!

In the end, to salvage our crumbling sense of self-worth, we put together a model of the water molecule using an orange, two toothpicks, and two plasticine balls.

The clip below shows a quick explanation to the make ups of water molecules and how the different strengths of chemical bonding result in water being in different states.

This post is linked up to:

1. Science Sunday: 10 July Summer Ideas
2. Hip Homeschool Hop - 7/1/14
3. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with the amazing new dryer
4. The Homeschool Mother's Journal (7/5/14)

The Chemistry of Colours

When I think of colour, I often think of it being a physics topic, as in, the light spectrum.  I had never thought about it in terms of chemistry, until Tiger attended the Spectacular Colour Chemistry workshop at The Royal Institution.

A lot of learning was covered in the workshop so I will try to recapture some of the most salient learning points for us.  The biggest learning point, for me personally, is to start thinking about how our perception of colour depends not only on how light is reflected (everyone knows that, obviously)...

but also how changes in chemical bonding and electrons in specific atoms can result in differences in colours, as perceived by the human eye.

This requires knowing more about the elements and of the periodic table (i.e. atomic mass and charge) so I can't speak any more knowledgeably about it than in very generic terms.

It appears that we need to know the fundamentals about the periodic table after all -- mental note to myself to cover the elements at some point.

I almost broke out in cold sweat in a corner of the room when the instructor started talking about atomic structure and neutralising charges via chemical bonding.

Luckily Tiger was able to hold his own in the class by answering correctly a question thrown at him out of the blue.  The question was to show how a helium atom can be neutralised by altering its mass and charge.  I don't know how he did it, but maybe his reading very widely has something to do with it.  Besides, the question essentially is more mathematical than scientific, so perhaps the mathematical nature of the question helped.

Anyhow, he earned his right to remain in the class.  The rest of the time was pretty easygoing.  Quite a bit of time was spent discussing about the differences between natural and synthetic dyes, followed by some hands-on activities to create natural dye from pomengranates.

The value of being in a dedicated science lab (as opposed to our kitchen lab) is obvious when the children got to create synthetic dye.  It would have been very difficult for me to get hold of the chemicals required to replicate the process at home.

Funnily enough, Tiger was just asking me how food colouring, i.e. synthetic dyes, are made.  He now knows the answer, thanks to this workshop.