We started the day nice and early with some delicious coffee. Thomas has been working extra long hours at the moment, and needs to keep going for the next few days. He’s helping out lots of fellow students with their end of year projects, doing sound engineering for various artists and their bands. He’s loving every moment of it, but is just starting to struggle getting up in the morning. It was very sweet this morning when Abigail, seeing her brother struggling to keep his eyes open at the breakfast table, offered me her Christmas voucher for sweeties, asking me to exchange it for a latte from the local coffee shop for Thomas instead. I love it when my children look out for each other, and this was particularly cute of Thomas’ little sister to give up her Christmas sweeties for her beloved brother.
Anyway, after some much needed caffeine and chore doing, we all settled down to our work for the day. Thomas left for college whilst the littles worked on their ACE books:
Charlotte did some mà ths, smiling delightfully about the prospect for a change:
And Lillie made a start on all her subjects:
She was working at the nursery all afternoon so needed to get all her work finished this morning.
I knew that this morning would be spent doing lots and lots of reading. I read some more of the Botany chapter on pollination. It’s fascinating! Did you know that bees make a decision on any given day to all go and search from pollen of the same plant, meaning they cross pollenate only the same species. Isn’t nature incredible?
I also read the next chapter from Science in the Ancient World about atoms in readiness for an experiment we’d be doing after lunch. It’s our last lesson on Democritus and we were particularly looking forward to the experiment!
I finished off The Secrets of Vesuvius. I have to say, I am so enjoying these books, they’re exciting, fast paced and have really likeable and relatable characters. Prime have the series of the Roman Mystery videos, the first being The Secrets of Vesuvius. I wouldn’t let them watch it until I had read it! They were so excited to watch it over lunch time!
Lastly, before lunch, the girls translated a story from Latin to English. I must get a photo of some of the work they are doing with their Latin. Every day I am bowled over by how much they are learning. I also read a Roman myth book on Icarus and Daedalus and we begun a report on Roman food.
After a lunch of salad and nectarines we set to work at our science for the week:
The first thing the girls did was some dictation for their botany notebook:
We then began an experiment which shows the displacement of metal ions. This was such a cool experiment! We soaked a stack of pennies and two pennies (made of copper) in a solution of white vinegar and salt. We also added an iron screw which we placed half in the solution and half out:
I will be writing about this experiment in depth, but basically the vinegar and salt solution cleaned the copper coins until they were super shiny, clearing the copper oxide off their surface. In doing so, it released copper ions into the solution.
These copper ions are attracted to the iron screw and form a thin layer of copper on its surface:
Coooooel!
The second science activity of the day was one from Abigail’s MEL Science. We do love these! Again, I will write a more detailed post about this soon, but needless to say it was a huge success, and very handily was all about the reactivity of metals, very similar to the aforementioned experiment:
She just loves any kind of science time:
Abigail grew tin on the zinc wire:
Again, so cool!
We do love our home-school science here an angelicscalliwags!