Gary’s home from work today, so I asked him if he’d like to explore egg throwing with his younger girls…
This is an activity from Abigail’s last Curiosity Box. We don’t want to move on to the next one until all the activities are completed in the current one. The goal is to create a landing module for an egg being thrown out of a first floor window, and which will prevent the egg being broken… that is if Gary can handle an egg without breaking it…ahem. One egg down and they haven’t even started on the landing module!
Anyhoooo, he had them design a great landing module, which included an egg box, a parachute and the possibility of a balloon for added resistance:
They went out to the garden to check which would make the gentlest landing, with or without the balloon:
With the balloon seemed to be the general consensus. They then wrapped up the egg in some tissue paper and took it next door to throw it out of Granny’s window (the only first floor window we had access to which didn’t have a roof directly below):
The first try resulted in a slightly cracked egg on impact.
Back to the drawing board, they changed the design slightly by using only one sheet of tissue paper to wrap around the egg, utilising the other two sheets by crumpling them up and placing them in the bag under the egg, thus preventing an impact injury. They tried it again:
Success! It worked! They were over the moon, and had thoroughly enjoyed their father teaching them instead of me 🙂
Back home, we quickly went through their tables flash cards and their Latin vocab flash cards, before Gary took all his girls bar Lillie (who was at work) to the café for a treat. We LOVE it when Daddy is home!
We had a mishmash of pancakes, bacon, toast, apple juice, hot chocolate and passionfruit cake which was shared around amongst us all:
I was brought a double hot latte in a takeaway cup without even asking for it! I love that I go in there often enough that the owner automatically knows what I want!
Back home, and I finished off some bits and pieces with the littles, whilst Charlotte continued with her much detested maths. I asked for a photo which would express how much she hated maths…only to be informed that she was learning decimals and fractions and they were easy peasy! You what now?! Who are you? And what have you done with my real Charlotte?!
The littles and I read through the Mystery of History lesson on King David, read a couple more chapters from the Secrets of Vesuvius, before completing the experiment from Science in the Ancient Times. It was an experiment which was meant to demonstrate that atoms and molecules move:
I shall be writing more about it in a separate post, but I will say that we had to do it about five times before what was meant to happen actually happened!
After we had sufficiently demonstrated that hot molecules move quicker and in this case in a specific direction (up) we quickly completed the lesson before moving onto Botany. Today, the girls learnt about carnivorous plants (aka the Venus Flytrap etc). They were fascinated. So, together, we looked up some time lapse videos with the different varieties of meat-eating plants capturing and eating their prey, and the graveyard of exoskeletons and bones left behind. It reminded me of Day of the Triffids, a tv series about gigantic human-eating plants, which my mother made both my brother and I watch when we were children because she was too scared to watch it by herself!
Lunchtime came and Gary and I picked up Lillie from work and then hunkered down for an hour to watch the latest episode of Designated Survivor. At two, I popped down to the café again to meet up with a lovely lady who used to go to our old church and wanted to know more about home-schooling. She is about to embark on her own home-school journey with her thirteen year old daughter. I love talking home-school, so I thoroughly enjoyed sharing our own journey with her.
Meanwhile, Daddy school was back in action as he and his girls made a robot drawing machine (it has a much catchier name than that but I can’t remember it and no-one is here to ask at the moment):
I’m thinking they might want me to go back to work and have Gary home-school them from now on!