Week 21 Feb 8th-12th: Winter Survival

 We started off our week with Story of the World, a chapter that focused on China and their continuing efforts of growth as a country. It was perfect timing as this last week was the beginning of Chinese New year! We decorated paper plate fans, and Avery go to make our 3D wood puzzle this week: Toothless the Dragon! I wanted to do a Chinese style dragon, but he happened to be looking over my shoulder as I ordered and so he got to select which dragon we purchased. It was a bit challenging for him, but with a little help he managed to build the dragon that day! Although I had planned to cook some Chinese style food, make more crafts, and have a mini Chinese New year party, we never got back to it!

The boys were in full baking mode this week! Probably why I didn't want to cook special foods because there were already so many dirty dishes!! Emmet made a banana bread cake one day, Michael made cookies twice this week, and then I made Valentines chocolates at the end of the week! So many sweets!

We hosted co-op on Tuesday and our theme was continuing what animals do in the winter. We had an awesome book that walked you through many animals and whether they adapt, migrate, or hibernate. We chose to hibernate and built hibernation dens with branches from our recently pruned grapes and fruit trees.

Since September we have had some ears of corn hanging in our garage. They were dry a long time ago but it was a project I hadn't come back around to yet. So this week we put one ear in the microwave in a paper bag to see what would happen (Emmet is eating from the slightly burnt ear in one picture), and we also pulled the kernels off one and put it in our popcorn popper. They did not have a great pop rate! And the ones that did pop, did not open fully. We had several types of corn in our patch last year and we think we dried the wrong ones for popcorn purposes! We still have several ears and I plan to try grinding some for cornbread!

Our new Spangler Science Box came!!! I have so many more pictures, but my Dropbox and phone are not communicating, and Blogger wont let me upload photos to a blog post through my phone. Technology drives me nuts some days!! BUT! We had a box about color changing and chemical reactions with bubbles! The set came with test tubes and a rack to hold them, color fizzy tablets made from baking soda and citric acid (think: bathbombs), and beautiful instruction cards for seven experiments. first we did color blending with fizzy tablets in water. Second we put a little water into tubes filled with vegetable oil, then plunked the fizzy tablets into them. They bubbled like a lava lamp, bubbles forming in the water and floating through the oil to the top to pop and start all over again. It was really fun to watch! We did color blending bubble experiments, adding Alka-Seltzer tablets to restart the bubbling after it had ceased, and then cleaned everything up and did a color blending through paper towels project. This was where you put certain colors in certain tubes, then twisted paper towels and stuck one end in one tube and the other end in the next tube, and so forth to the end. It took almost two days, but then the colors in the paper towels were blended! So the first tube had red, the second tube had yellow, and the towel connecting them was orange between the tubes! Super fun!

And then there was snow!! Our plans for the rest of the week were put on hold as we had about a foot of snow and lots of freezing rain. We did not have the ice as much as the rest of the state seems to have gotten, but our road is super steep and did have ice under all the snow for a few days, so we stayed home and played games, watched movies, read The Girl Who Drank The Moon as our read aloud, and spent a lot of time hauling water for animals. Hope you stayed warm and didn't lose power!

The Dillmans