Algebra and Science

Earlier on in the week Timmy and Gideon decided they wanted to play DragonBox Algebra. It is a video game that teaches basic algebra. They picked up on the rules pretty quickly, and then they played through all of the levels. They can do basic algebra to isolate x if the operations in the equation are only +-*/, and they are given help to remind them to constantly balance the equation.

The girls used to have drapes installed in their room, but when the windows got installed they were taken down temporarily. We finally reinstalled them this week, and also gave their door know an upgrade - swapping it for a locking one.

Baby Elizabeth got a cold, but she has mostly recovered from it. It is very nice to no longer feel obligated to stay away from people all the time - not that we get much social interaction with Covid, but taking it down to none when someone gets a cold is always miserable.

One day this week Mike got it in his head to clear off all of the kids board game shelves and to reorganize the contents. It took a lot of work, but they are all looking much cleaner now, and they all fit without spilling over into Mike's game shelves.

Another day this week we did Science for school, and it went really well! Alison is super picky about science and thinks that most elementary level science is taught in a very unhelpful way. They assign kids demonstrations and observations and then tell them to follow the steps of the scientific method on them, when the whole point of the scientific method is to first observe something, then think up questions about it, THEN do the science. Trying to force your observations into the format of "Questions, Hypothesis, Experiment, Results, Conclusion" is just stupid and makes science hard and un-fun in Alison's opinion (which you have probably heard more of than you cared about at this point :P).

Anyway, so we did some demonstrations out of the kids' favorite Candy Science book and watched Skittles sink into ice cubes. We asked ourselves why, and suggested that maybe it was the weight of the Skittle pulling it down. Then we asked ourselves how we could prove that that was not true (since science can only prove a negative) and decided to find small rocks the size of Skittles and put them on ice too and see if they sank the same way as Skittles. We debated the experimental design and ended up putting a Skittle and a rock on the same ice cube, and another Skittle and rock on different ice cubes, to see if it mattered. We measured how deep they sank with calipers and found that on separate ice cubes, the rock sank less than half as far as the Skittle, but on the same ice cube, it sank almost as far. We decided that there was something about the Skittle that made it sink faster.

That was our most organized bit, but we investigated other candies and sugar and ice and realized that the sugar was melting the ice faster than it would without sugar. It was a lot of fun and really good science, so Alison was very happy and proud.

The kids and Alison went to nature group on Friday, since Baby was pretty much better from her cold. Rea and Sara went to the Dojo for the first time and Rea made it across the blindfold balance challenge on her first try! (In previous years, it has taken people months to succeed at that challenge, but Rea is very good at that kind of thing.) Currently, the Dojo has activities about knot tying, target throwing, trap making, tracking, and a few other things I can't currently remember. Alison and the boys and baby didn't want to walk that far, so we played by the dry creekbed instead. It was a good day.

On Saturday Grandma and Grandpa Mike and Sheila invited us over for dinner. They served lasagna and we brought baguettes. We had fun talking and watching a video. It is great that they are moving over so soon!

Shortly before we went to their house, Baby Elizabeth got hold of Alison's lipstick and liberally painted herself with it. It was quite a sight! Even with half an hour of washing, it was pretty extreme when we went to see the grandparents. It's slowly wearing off.

Mike also had made plans for remodeling the downstairs shower. We have ordered the hard to find parts, and it should hopefully come in soon so that we can start on the work.

Today the kids got out Herd Your Horses again for the first time in a long time. They enjoyed it enough that they want to add it to the blog. Sara had a herd of 20 horses by the time the game was over. We also went on a walk to the park for a while. It was a fun day.