Oct. 7, 2005

Quick Note on Today

Not much to say for today, I guess.  We cleaned, made pear jelly and talked a bit more about Pasteur.  Dd6 told me the basic principles behind pasteurization and told me how to do it as I pasteurized the jelly.  For her notebook, we reviewed what we discussed about spontaneous generation and the idea of life coming from nothing.  We defined "hypothesis" and prepared a demonstration activity.  Pasteur's experiment with rancid meat is pretty easy to recreate, but, well, it involves rancid meat.  Yuck.  Maybe when she's a bit older.  She took a slice of bread and a wet paper towel and slid it in a plastic bag.  I asked her what she thought would happen based on what she knows.  She thought it might rust or grow algae.  Not a bad hypothesis, I think, given her knowledge of what happens to things when they are wet for awhile. She drew a picture of the bread for her notebook, and I took a picture.  We are going to do this each day until we have a nice beautiful array of bread mold to look at.  Then we will re-examine her hypothesis.  Hopefully she will remember our discussions about where life comes from and realize that the mold is in the air all the time, just waiting for a good soggy piece of bread to reproduce on.  And that really is pretty much all that was accomplished today.  Dad is home which means there are just more important things to do...like go swimming at the Y while mom looks after ds2 and dd4mos.  So I guess maybe a lot more was actually accomplished than what is accomplished in your typical "school" day.

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