Mozi Esmé: M4 - April Week 2

This week was rather a hodgepodge of springy stuff...

Motion

Rainbows

It's just that time of year - it seemed like the right time to fit rainbows in!

They don't seem to have a lot of motion to them, but Mom says they are made up of light waves. Light shining through through a prism is separated into its different wavelengths, from red to purple. Always in the same color order.

And raindrops act as small prisms, making rainbows when the sun shines on them...

So we decided to make rainbows without rain. We tried lots of different methods. Using white paper and water in glasses and glass bowls and mirrors and flashlights and sunlight. Nothing worked really well, though the prisms on Mom's watch made little tiny rainbows if you looked carefully.

Except for CD rainbows. CD rainbows work every time! Here I am making one by shining a flashlight on a CD.

Only Mom's picture doesn't show it very well. So I grabbed the camera from her and took my own rainbow picture. Now you can really see the rainbows!

Of course, we read our rainbow book: What Makes a Rainbow by Betty Ann Schwartz

Matter

Wool

Since we're studying Mary Had a Little Lamb as our book of the week, and spring's a good time to get all that wool off of those poor sheep around here, we decided to look at wool and its insulation properties.

First we looked at videos about how to shear sheep. We started with this sheep shearing video and then watched some of the others that popped up in YouTube. Those poor sheep must be very very cold now! Though Mom said they probably feel nice and cool in the warm weather, I think they are just cold. We also took a virtual sheep farm tour.

Then I put on a wool scarf. It kept me real warm!

We talked about how wool is one of the best natural insulators and talked about our quilt experiment - how the ice in the quilt melted far slower than the ice just in the open. Here are some more insulation experiments you can try.

Mitosis

Seeds

Just another one of those "right times of the year" things! Daddy bought a tray with 36 peat pellets, and we had 16 packets of seeds. Seeds come in all shapes and sizes! Watermelon and sunflower seeds are my favorite. And if you dump two packets of seeds onto the table and mix them up, you get in trouble. Take my word for it.

So FIRST we had to decide which seeds were gonna go where. Each type of seed got two pellets assigned to it, and I decided the four extras would get alyssum seeds.

Then we poured warm water into the pellets until they grew nice and big. We planted the seeds in the "dibble" (new word of the week) of the peat pellet.

Seven days later, we have lots of little tiny tiny sprouts. And some really big ones. The Chinese cabbage ones, of course. These are the things that grew like crazy in our Mozambique garden but were hardly edible. They made great bunny food, though. So maybe we need to get some bunnies.

(We've got this growth tracking sheet from Peep and Our Big Wide World.)

We read a couple of books:

The Trellis and the Seed by Jan Karon
From Seed to Plant by Gail Gibbons
Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert
The Magic School Bus Plants Seeds - we got the video from the library, too, and I watched it over and over and OVER and OVER!

There are scads of seed and garden materials you can make lapbooks from:

And here's a really cool miniature fairy garden idea from Childhood Magic.

And Me

Eyes/Sight

First we watched the Sight Song at Sid the Science Kid (click the Videos link and then scroll to the Sight Song). Check out his Vision Investigation activity, too.

I colored some eyes. Of course, the eyes needed a mouth and hair and eyebrows, too...

Then we glued them on to the ME shape that Mom traced and cut last week.

Of course, I had to test out what it would be like not to have eyes... Not cool!

We talked about how some people are nearsighted and some people are farsighted. Mom showed me her glasses and how they made things look funny! Then I checked out this eye chart. Mom tried to get me to stand far away and read the letters to her, like I was taking an eye test, but I wanted to get up close and personal and point to all the letters as I said them.