Bible time this week focuses on Saul going after David up to the first time David spares Saul. It is interesting. David says he doesn't want to take the life of God's anointed (Saul), and make it look like he killed him in order to be king sooner. But yet, he's willing to go after Nabal just because he refused him food. Just an interesting contrast. Not sure what to make of it. We also took a look at a few of the Psalms.
We read a chapter a day in The Children's Homer. Rabbit still doesn't quiet get all of it. I think I need to perhaps discuss it more with her. This is kind of our Greek History right now.
In Science, we did a couple of the experiments. The first one was Fishy Moves. The idea was to see how the shape of the fish and the fins and tail helped the fish move. So, first we made a fin-less fish like this:
Then we set up our tub of water in the bathtub (too cold for outdoors). I used one of those shoebox-sized plastic bins. It is propped up on some other bath toys, so the water will flow out the other end of the box. It is also convenient that we have the shower head on a hose. (Water restrictions due to arid climate means we don't just run the water into the tub for 20 minutes to try an experiment.) Here's the tub all set up:
Then we made the head bigger like this:
Rabbit didn't think it really felt that different in the tub. Next, we added fins. She said it made a big difference on how it felt to go up and down:
Then we bent the tail like this:
Rabbit said it really made the fish seem like it wanted to turn in circles.
The other experiment we did was the Sink or Float. This is one of the things that bothers me in Genesis for Kids - they don't always give 100% clear instructions. For example, in the lesson, it said to make your foil like a "duck-bottomed boat." Well, I don't know what a duck-bottomed boat is. So, I assumed that meant a "flat-bottomed boat," but I don't know if that's really what they wanted, and the picture for that lesson wasn't clear. Anyway, like mfwrocks, the first time we dropped the ball of foil into the water, it didn't float. My guess was that there was still too much air in the ball of foil. So, I found a large flat object and pressed and pressed and pressed, and then we had a very small cube of foil. That did sink:
The other part of the experiment was to measure how much water was displaced by each foil object -whether or not it would be the same. So, we put our dish into a baking pan and topped off our bowl. Then I dropped in the boat. We had some overflow. Problem was, the bowl with all the water was too heavy for me to lift off the pan without spilling the water that was left in the bowl. Even if it had been a very small bowl, I don't know that I could have lifted a small bowl up and not spilled any, because not that much water overflowed.
The next problem with this part of the experiment is how to know if I've filled up my bowl with the exact same amount of water that I used the first time? I used a large bowl (actually a baking dish) and didn't think to try to measure exactly how much water I put in for the first piece of foil. Anyway, we refilled, and dropped in the little squashed square - no overflow. Anyway, if you do this second part of the experiment, use a very small bowl and measure how much water you put in.
We didn't do any of the bug experiments. I don't think we have fruit flies here in the dead of winter anyway. And bugs are pretty much non-existent with 4 inches of snow on the ground. That's alright, though.
We didn't do God and the History of Art this week. Oh, we read through the lessons, and talked about the Art Journal lesson. I actually bought all the kids a sketch book a couple of weeks ago, and they've really been getting into drawing in those.
The rest of school is going well. We're almost done writing our short story for Writing Strands. It has been a lot of me giving Rabbit starter ideas and such. Math is going well for now. And even Spelling is going pretty smoothly. My only thing against All About Spelling is that it is hard to stop at 15 minutes. Just doing the review section with Rabbit can take 7 minutes, and there is usually at least 7 more minutes of instruction, plus dictation and writing station. So, Spelling is usually going 20 to 30 minutes a day. But, I feel like it is something worth devoting that much time to.
All in all, not a bad week.
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