A post over at TWTM got me thinking about the wonderful solar projector SK made back in ‘03. He had great fun with this:

He was thrilled cause he could see the sun spots.

He eventually used K’Nex to build a huge stand for the binoculars and a holder for the large white board. The sun is projected through the binocular eyepiece onto the white board, and you use both the binocular focus piece and the distance between the binocular and the white board to bring everything into focus.

The spots, black, can be seen on the sun. Over several weeks he tracked where the spots were and he was actually able to watch them move across the suns surface.

MK and I took a little field trip to Cape Henlopen State Park today; wonderful weather, great group of HS’ing kids for the most part. There was only one kid who did not know the meaning of “Do Not Touch That” (or stop doing that, or hands to yourself). I’ll blame the parents for the lack of discipline in the kid, not the kid. They just shock their head when the kid didn’t listen to their request to “stop” !! YIKES!

Anyway, MK learned about the importance of a marsh and we walked out into the marsh too. Did you know that if you rub your fingers on a marsh grass blade you can taste the salt on your hand? Really! The marsh grass excretes the salt out to the surface and the reason scientist give for why the marsh grass doesn’t swell up in size. We also tasted sea moss that was salty and tasted just like celery. But the best part; having half the group jump into the air sending shock waves through the marsh for the rest of us to feel. Totally cool and something I had never experienced before. Worth all the mosquito bites I received.

My SIL sent this to me; cracked me up, but how will I ever HS when these 7 guys arrive?

Yesterday MK and SK sat down and began the math drill race. MK, determined to beat his time of 100 multiplication facts in 4 minutes, raced with vigor through his sheet. Suddenly he shouted “I’m DONE!”

And SK was heard to exclaim, “He beat me. I can’t believe he beat me.”

MK completed his 100 multiplication problems in 3 minutes and 2 seconds, a full minute faster than last Friday’s time. He was laughing and jumping for joy!

Today, the race was on. SK was determined to go faster than MK and not be beat by his little brother. They both won. MK again did 100 multiplication problems in 3 minutes and Michael did them in 2-1/2 minutes. They have both improved on how quickly they can recall their math facts but the race is on. MK is determined to go faster than MK and SK is determined to not allow that to happen again.

Last week I visited Terri, an organizational Queen, and of course admired her homeschool room with all its little boxes, drawers neatly organized — ah, it was beautiful. Everything so neat and tidy and in its place! Long time readers of my blog know that Terri helped me organize our school room. A great space that has worked well for the last 9 months or so.

Lately I’ve been feeling that we have lost time searching for pens, pencils, glue sticks, … you name it they all seem to either be someplace else or are in a tangle of messiness. And then there’s the lost time looking for papers, and wondering where to file them. I really hate wasting time searching for ‘things’.

I complained in my head about how I lacked a desk but decided that it would not deter me, somehow, someway I too would organize. So, of course I lifted ideas from Terri’s space. The first part of the plan was to obtain a two drawer file cabinet and a multi-drawer tower. Unfortunately these items do not fit under the school table, aka my desk by the guys in the family, but no, I won’t call that table my desk even if it is where all my papers and other stuff lives.
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The tower’s drawers are wide and deep and at first I tried just putting pencils in one drawer and pens in another, but realized that there was wasted space. I hate wasted space plus I had other items I wanted in these drawers.

MK and I headed to WalMart to check out drawer dividers and little boxes. Oh my! The prices were outrageous and I needed so many of these things. I asked MK to use his origami skills to make me a few little boxes. Aren’t these cute! Four little boxes to hold my black permanent markers, my colored permanent markers, blue pens and one for black pens.

These boxes hold my wet-erase pens, erasers, sticky’s, fountain pens and calligraphy pens.

The last drawer has dry erase pens, one for thin width-pens, and another box for wide width pens.

Ahh, organized Everything in its place and a place for everything!

MK then made a food chain using his origami skills to make a large fish head eating a smaller fish head, on and on and on. Great model of a food chain and such a creative kid!

We pulled out the science gear and determined if iodine could detect starch in a solution. WOW, it turned it black (the test tube on the the left is iodine in water, 2nd from the left is iodine in a starch solution). The next two tubes dealt with detecting fat in solution, however it didn’t work for us. The far right tubes were used to see if we could detect protein in a solution. The second tube from the right contains a clear solution — water and a copper sulfate and caustic soda solution; while the one on the right turned purple when the copper sulfate and caustic soda solution was dropped into it.

Here’s an update on our bean seed:

The big green thing behind the bean is just construction paper.  It held the kidney bean in place until it started growing roots.  What is amazing today is the quantity of growth in the leaves. it is a full inch above the glass, growing a good 2″ today!

Last evening we talked about getting a new digital camera so of course our old one has decided to work a few more times. Here are the guys working this morning, still installing soffits.

As you can see the garage doors did not go on yesterday:

We’ve sorta decided upon purchasing the Nikon D50 camera, but I’m not sure I want to spend that much on a camera. Still looking, still unsure whether to just spend the $$ or not. We’ve had our little Canon PowerShot S40 since 2001, but there are just so many choices in digital cameras now, which to chose?

The garage building process is progressing—sorry I haven’t posted any photos but our digital camera hasn’t been working right Sometimes it will take the photo and sometimes not at all, which you don’t know until you go to download them. But I was able to get these photos this morning.

To me this photo of the front-side makes the place look small but that’s a full size pick-up truck and it’s 40′ across the front. As you can see in the photos the walls are up, roof is on, floor laid, windows in, side-door on.

The boys are adding on the soffits until the rain comes. SK is up on the ladder hammering while MK passes stuff to him:

The garage doors came in but need to be picked up from Lowe’s. They will go on today during the rain, and we will soon be purchasing siding, insulation, and electrical supplies. These are BIG ticket items. So, when a homeschooling friend shared that they had purchased several Lowe’s coupons on EBay for 10% off, I went over to EBay, found a couple hundred listings for Lowe’s Coupons, read the fine print;

“These are real Lowe’s coupons that can be used immediately. Each time you use one of these coupons, you can save up to $1000 on your entire purchase. Each coupon has a unique bar code that allows for one time use only. Most Home Depot stores that accept competitor’s coupons will accept these, but please verify with your local store before bidding.
Coupon fine print:
Coupon not redeemable for cash and cannot be used in combination with any other coupon or discount. Limit one per household. Good for a single purchase of merchandise only up to 10,000. Not valid on previous sales, installation fees, or gift cards.”

and decided to bid on a coupon set. I quickly won 3 coupons for all of $1.98. They arrived in the mail and then I read the REAL FINE PRINT:

†Coupon is not redeemable for cash, is nontransferable and cannot be used in conjunction with any other coupon or discount. Void if copied, transferred, or sold through any on-line auctions. Limit one coupon per household

Yep, nontransferable and void if sold through any on-line auctions.

The code of ethics, doing what is proper and honest at all times, is what we have instilled in our boys.   DH and I looked at the three coupons and have decided that in our heart we cannot use them. Unethical in our minds to use them since the print states that they are void if sold through any on-line auction. Ironically I also visited Lowe’s homepage where I found the coupon, requested one, and Lowe’s sent it to me which we will use, but not the other three. Call me silly, or stupid for not using them, but in our home to do so would be unethical.

DH and I had our little discussion at the kitchen table, where the boys could hear us discuss how much money the coupons would save us, but also about how to do so would be unethical for us. I followed all this with a little email over to EBay too. I don’t know if they will do anything about it, but with 174 coupon listings for Lowe’s alone, they should. Ethics 101, Saturday morning, 8AM, ahh, feel good moment.

Best laid plans of mine often get lost somewhere between the To Do list and the dirty dishes, except for this time. This time I actually followed through, and I’m so proud! I really just want to scream with joy.

Last year Calculadders was on MilitaryKid’s daily work plan and sometimes we actually worked on it and sometimes we didn’t. Secretly I really just hoped that MK’s math fact skills would magically take off on their own, and he would magically know his math facts and be able to recall them quickly.

It didn’t happen, and then his IOWA test results came in. The test results didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know, but there it was in black and white; COMPUTATION SKILLS for each of the math operations. Addition was way below normal while the other three were only close to the norm for a 4th grader. When you consider that he scored quite high in all other areas seeing these numbers, in black and white, brought it to my attention that I had better make a plan to help MK get to where he needed to be. Help him get fast in math computation.

My plan was that every day MK would do 100 simple math fact problems in each of the four operations; one sheet of addition problems, one sheet for subtraction, one sheet for multiplication and one sheet of division problems. The problems are all simple problems such as, 2×6, or 24/8, simple problems to be worked quickly. To generate the sheets I used Math Factory Worksheets, free off the web too.

When we began the school year MK began doing these sheets each day, for a total of 400 problems, in addition to his 5th grade Singapore Math book. It was way too much and MK just stalled out, overwhelmed by the quantity of math work. I felt for him and knew I had to change it so that he could see that he was improving and gaining ground toward the goal; getting fast in recalling math facts.

I added a timer into the mix and set the goal of getting 100 math facts done in 4 minutes. MK liked the idea that he only had to work for 4 minutes per sheet until he saw how few problems he did. With the timer going MK only did 8 subtraction problems, 6 division problems, 20 addition problems and 15 multiplication problems. Way too slow.

We’ve included these sheets just about every school day since we started near the end of August and it wasn’t too long before SK joined in. He expressed concern that his math fact recall was slow too and needed to be improved. On his first day he was unable to do any of the sheets in under 4 minutes but he is now able to that in each operation.

It didn’t take MK too long before he was able to do 100 addition problems in 4 minutes, and now he’s doing them in 2-1/2 minutes! But today, today was a landmark day! Mark did 100 multiplication problems in 4 minutes! He did 80 subtraction problems and 50 division problems each in 4 minutes. What an improvement! YEA MK!!

Updated to add on Tuesday, Sept 26:

MK did 100 multiplication problems in 3 minutes and 2 seconds today. He was laughing and jumping for joy!

Yesterday I decided to start doing lots of science experiments or demonstrations. It’s just something that we used to do often but during the last couple years just hasn’t been on our hs’ing plate too often. This year this is one thing I am trying to do differently.

In science MK and SK have been studying ‘CELLS’ and osmosis. Our potato experiments were begun yesterday; and MK observed the affects of osmosis. For our one experiment he placed 3 potato halves in a dish of water with a hallow area in each of their centers. One half of a potato was cooked to see if cooking (killing the cells) would have any effect on osmosis. In the hallow of one of the raw and the cooked potato we placed some sugar. Every once in awhile he would look at the potatoes; “Mom, the cooked one looks ugly!”

“Mom, there’s a pool in the middle of the raw potato!”

Sure enough the experiment worked — I love it when that happens.

This morning I continued our first-thing-in-the-morning-set-up-an-experiment routine. Can I call it a routine yet since we’ve only done this two mornings? Yesterday I spotted another cool experiment in the How Nature Works book that I knew we needed to do before the leaves started changing. I went outside and took a few leaves off several different trees. Once inside I borrowed the acetone from DH’s workshop, set up tall glasses on the counter, ground the leaves in my little grinder — MK didn’t care for the noise so he hid behind the counter–, placed one leaf set into each glass, added a little acetone, and then stuck a long piece of coffee filter into the mixture. Very soon the pigment was wicked up the coffee filter leaving tell-tale signs of the various colors contained in the green leaves.
This little experiment reminded SK and MK about an experiment from a few years back. They took ink pens, blotted coffee filters with the pen, stuck the paper end in water and watched the pigment colors separate. Of course they needed to repeat this experiment and they surely have the freedom to explore the topic.
Ahh, experiments. Makes the day fun.