Path of Life Christian Academy
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Apr. 18, 2008
Weather in a Jar - April 18 post #1
Posted in Science
JESUS IS COMING SOON! MARANATHA LORD!
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Hi friends, if you need to silence the music just hit the play/pause button on the player in the right sidebar, just below the black horse and the copyright notice.
For science today, we learned about weather and clouds types, and we made weather in a jar.
The basic idea is that there is warm water in the bottom of the jar, and ice sealed in a bag and sitting in the funnel. The warm water rises as water vapor, comes in contact with the cool funnel and condenses, forming a "cloud" in the jar, and water droplets on the funnel, well the jar certainly got foggy!
If you look very carefully, you can see a "raindrop" forming on the tip of the funnel. I had to take the bag of ice out and show my kids that it wasn't leaking, they were convinced it was.
Mar. 20, 2008
I Love it when the UPS Man Visits!
Posted in Science
*This post is also my Project 365 post of the day.*
JESUS IS COMING SOON! MARANATHA LORD!
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Hi friends, if you need to silence the music just hit the play/pause button on the player in the right sidebar, just below the black horse and the copyright notice.
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I just love it when the UPS man visits! It makes my day! Why, you ask? Is he just a likable fellow? Well, I actually have no idea whether he is or not, but I LOVE the goodies he brings! 
For example, here is what he brought by yesterday!
Mar. 6, 2008
I Really Do Post about Homeschool Occasionally! March 6 Post #2.
Posted in Science
JESUS IS COMING SOON! MARANATHA LORD!
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Hi friends, if you need to silence the music just hit the play/pause button on the player in the right sidebar, just below the black horse and the copyright notice.
This is yet another catch up post. While I couldn't blog, things continued on, and I continued taking pictures. This one shows my littles proudly showing off the chart we made showing the layers of the atmosphere. The layers are actually to scale, except for the thermosphere, which would have required a paper taller than my house to make it to scale!
The meteoroids in the thermosphere are NOT to scale, and neither are the airplanes my kids drew. If they were the largest meteoroid shown would be about 12 miles across, and the largest plane shown would be over 5 miles long.
Nov. 17, 2007
More High School Science
Posted in Science
My High School Student has also been busy with Science, she is using Apologia Physical Science, and there are SO many labs that I should have tons of pictures of really wonderful experiments. Unfortunately, she usually does the experiments on her own or with her dad when I am at work. Too bad because I really enjoy helping with them and snapping photos.
A couple of weeks ago I was actually home for one of the experiments, not only that, I video taped it! 
The point of the experiment was to once again use a nine volt battery to separate the hydrogen and oxygen from water. What was different from LAST TIME was that this time we had to collect the gases each in in a different test tube. After awhile we compared the amounts of the gases in the test tubes. There was more hydrogen than oxygen because a water molecule has two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen.
In this first video clip I was shooting as close as possible on the test tubes so we could see the gases rising out of the water.
Well, I wanted my daughter to express what was going on herself, because I think we retain more when we have to put it in our words. Note that I had changed where I was shooting from, the test tube that was on the left before, is the one on the right in this shot. (Also, sorry that the video lags behind the audio... it only does that here on this blog, not when I play it on my home PC. I don't know why it's doing it here). So here she is explaining what was happening:
Nov. 17, 2007
More About Volcanoes!
Posted in Science
Obviously I could not finish of our Volcano studies without doing the well loved, classic, vinegar and baking soda volcano experiment. Now I know this really had more to do with chemistry than with Earth Science, but still... who could resist this one?
I kept it simple by using a plastic water bottle and piling wet sand all around it instead of making one from clay or paper maché. I kept it fairly clean by doing it out doors.
My oldest daughter was in charge of taking video of it, but unfortunately she did not realize that the camera wasn't recording... oh well, no big deal. 
Anyway, I did manage to snap a neat little picture before it was all done. Here it is.
Now, it was really much more exciting minutes before this, but my daughter had the camera and thought she was getting video. By the time we realized we weren't getting it, the "lava flow" had slowed quite a bit, but you get the idea anyway.
We actually did this before the VOLCANO LAPBOOKS, but I just now got around to uploading the photo. 
Nov. 13, 2007
Volcano Lap Books
Posted in Science
Well, this year we have been studying Earth Science. Recently we covered a chapter about volcanoes in our Science Book. My kids seemed very interested, so we decided to make some volcano Folder Books (also known as lap books).
I promised photos of them, so HERE THEY ARE!
This first photo shows the front cover of my son's:
This next photo shows my son's book with the two front flaps opened up. We have also been studying the Byzantine era in History, and one of our assignments was to make a Mosaic, so we incorporated our History and Science together and made a paper Volcano Mosaic for the center flap of our folder book.
This next photo shows the whole inside of the book when you lift up the center flap:
The center flap, (the one with the Mosaic) lifts up and on the back of it are three mini books. Here are some close up views of the mini-books:
Now, because I thought I might need a closer view of some of the stuff inside, so I also took this (notice that I moved the wheel that shows the three states of a volcano, now it is showing information about an active volcano):
My five year old daughter's volcano had all the same info, but she chose her own layout for some of it, here are a few shots of hers:
First, the Cover:
Then the inside with the center flap down:
Then with the flap up:
Here mini-books had exactly the same thing in them, so I won't post separate photos of them.
Now, here is the really neat part. Except for the cost of basic materials such as file folders, glue, construction paper, and printer ink, these folder books cost me nothing. I found all of the materials on-line. The wheel in the center was a free sample from Hands of a Child. The rest of the stuff either came out of the reproducibles in our science book (Christian Kids Explore Earth and Space), or were things I found on-line by Googling things like "Tectonic Plates", "Volcanoes", and "Magma Chamber". Unfortunately, I forgot to save the links to all the sites I found so that I could share them on here. I guess if you want to do these, you'll have to do some searching on your own!
Nov. 11, 2007
About Cavey
Posted in Science
Cavey (our pet stalagmite) and Cavey Junior, (pet stalactite), had an accident. 
If they seem to be progressing in spite of this accident I will post more photos of them eventually, but if not.... then I guess its Good bye to the Cave Things.
For details about the accident, click HERE. and look at item 2.
Nov. 2, 2007
The Cave Thing Returns!
Oct. 20, 2007
Finally, a Post About Homeschooling....
Posted in Science
I FINALLY get to write something about homeschooling! Well, I suppose I could write something about it nearly every day, but I fear my readers would get bored to read again and again, "My son took too long to do his Math today, so we did not have enough time left to do art."
Well, today I can post something a little bit more interesting than that. We have been growing a Stalagmite (this is a cave formation) in our basement for quite awhile, and now I get to post some pictures about it!
Naturally, stalagmites and other speleothems form in caves from mineral saturated water slowly dripping, evaporating, and leaving the minerals behind, as years go by, the minerals build up into beautiful and stunning natural rock formations that motivate many people to explore deep into the earth just to get a picture. My littles and I decided to just simulate this in our basement, maybe when their older we could try some actual Spelunking.
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October 8th Day #1
We mixed some Epsom Salts in warm water, we kept stirring the Epsom Salt into the water until no more would dissolve. Then we divided the water between two canning jars, wet a cotton string in the water, and suspended it between the jars. We put a saucer in between the two jars, and sprinkled a few grains of salt on the saucer directly below the string. Here is what it looked like when we were done:
Now, here is a close up of the saucer. As you can see there is a little salt on the saucer to help get things started, and the water is already starting to drip down on the saucer, but there are no formations growing yet.
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October 9-12 Days 2-5
Then we waited, and waited. We checked each day for next four days, there was virtually no change. Oh sure, the puddle of water on the saucer got a little bigger, but that was it. There was nothing worth taking a picture of. So instead of a picture I will just post this:
And we will pretend that he is a spelunker who has gotten himself into an uncomfortable position.
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October 13 Day 6
Well, by the time we got to Day 6 and still had seen no changes. The littles and I were getting a little worried that nothing would happen. I went downstairs that day with no expectations at all. Surprise, Surprise! Look at what we found!
In case that just looks a puddle to you, let me tell you that if you look closely you will see CRYSTALS growing! Here is a close-up, so you can see them better:
Okay, so you are probably not as excited by this as I was, just imagine that you have been checking on this every day for six days and nothing happened until now!
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October 14 Day 7
Just one day later, and we had a little "bump" on our saucer:
Here is a closer view of our "bump".
Now I know some of you might be thinking that what you see is a stalagmite, and you are correct that it is sort of a cultured one. However, my littles and I quickly came to prefer the much more technical term of "bump".
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October 15 Day 8
The bump is continuing to grow, (Oh no! Its alive! Its alive!---just kidding.)
We took three pictures of it that day. Here they are:
I took the picture at three different angles to try and show how this thing was really shaped, but I am afraid that the pictures don't really do it justice.
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October 16 Day 9
Here is how it looked:
In this bottom photo you will notice that the top looks a little misshapen. Actually it was fairly smooth, but a drop of water had just landed on it, and for a short while it looked like this:
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October 17 Day 10 The Final Day.... or is it?
Now, the book said to run this experiment for ten days. So here is what our stalagmite (a.k.a. "the bump") looked like on day ten.
Now here is where we ran into a problem, my kids seem to think of this thing as their new "pet"! So they did not want to "do away with it" just yet. I plan to take the next photo on day twenty, (October 27th). I will take no pictures between now and then, so the next time I post about this we will get to see how much change took place over ten more days.
So until then... who knows what kind of rambling I'll be posting?
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Oct. 10, 2007
Science Experiment not going so well.
Posted in Science
 I was hoping by now to be able to report that we were growing a little speleothem (cave formation) in our basement, but for some reason nothing is happening yet. I followed all of the instructions in our science book to the "T" but for some reason nothing is happening yet. It is only supposed to take 10 days total, so I was expecting SOMETHING after three days. Oh well, we'll wait the full 10 days and see what happens. If nothing happens at all we will start again, just in case we did something wrong.
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A record of our homeschooling journey (and my random thoughts), as we look to the Lord to show us the Path Of Life. We are a homeschooling family with a strong leaning toward the Classical and Charlotte Mason styles, but since we blend the two philosophies, along with whatever other ideas we like, we classify our homeschool as eclectic.
Our School Mascot
As you can see, my kids adopted a school mascot, feel free to feed him an apple or brush him by clicking on the button that says "more".
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