you microwaved what!?

so...this crazy little experiment has been floating around the interwebs lately. being that we are a crazy little homeschool family, we just had to try it.  enter the ivory soap experiment... or if you want to sound like you are really 'learning' something you can call it the charles law experiment. basically... you stick a bar of ivory soap in the micro and watch it turn into a big fluffy cloud! it is pretty darn cool.
to make it more of an 'official' science experiment the kids each wrote a hypothesis stating what they thought would happen and wrote their observations of the soaps pre-microwave.  all i had on hand as our comparison soap was an old mini bar of hotel soap. we microwaved that first and it pretty much just melted into a pile of something that resembled cat puke. gross. i will spare you the photo.
the ivory soap experiment did not fail us as you can see from our pictures...i'm pretty sure my kids thought i was the coolest science teacher ever- that day. try it... i promise you will earn some cool points...and your house will smell ivory fresh. :)

cha-ching!

back in the fall chris brought home this great tall vase/jar thingy and it inspired us to start an everyday change savings for something fun. the kids had been eyeing a big lego set that cost upwards of $100! gasp!! i could never in my right mind plunk down that kind of dough for toys. especially those that more often than not get eaten by the dog. so- we made a deal. all of our change would go in the big jar until we had saved enough for legos.
this time of year it takes a bit more effort to get through our school day.  some of our typical weekly activities with friends are still on break until the spring- so finding something different and interesting to do seems to be the challenge every week. last week i noticed our jar was mighty full and thought that counting all those abe's and george's would make for a fun math lesson! we poured the whole jar out on the coffee table and started sorting. the kids loved it! jack counted piles of ten pennies and grace went hard to work putting all the quarters in stacks of four. once everything was sorted and counted we had saved up $116 dollars!  it was quite a fun afternoon project and much better than multiplication worksheets. :)