Week 33 May 17th-22: Science at the Beach!

We started the week with our Steve Spangler box! This months theme was fun with water science! We learned about cohesion and surface tension by adding drops of water to the surface of a coin. They could hold many more drops than we hypothesized! We used a test tube and then a jar with a mesh screen to find out how water bonds together in ideal situations and air pressure will cause it to defy gravity. This also taught us more about cohesion and adhesion as we used a toothpick to poke into the gravity defying water through the mesh screen and no water would fall out! The box contained some water gel, a polymer that is super absorbent and bonds to the water molecules. Over time the water will evaporate, turning it back into powder. However, the boys decided to use salt as per the instructions, which broke the polymer bonds and turned it back to liquid. The very last experiment was dissection of a baby diaper to find out how the same water gel polymer works to catch liquid. They were NOT interested in that project so we have not done it. hahaha.

Latest farm news!!! Our mama turkey hatched 10 baby turkeys!! When a bird hatches eggs, after sitting on the remaining eggs and hatched chicks for a few days, she then gets up to start teaching the new babies to find food and water, leaving the unhatched eggs that must be duds. We have opened these duds in the past when our chickens hatched eggs to explore what went wrong in the development process. Usually an egg isn't fertilized, or something caused mama to leave the nest one day and humidity got too low and caused the egg to stop developing. The first turkey egg we cracked open was the humidity, a half formed dead turkey chick. The second egg was a just few days away from hatching and was still alive!!! Oh no!! So we took the remaining 5 eggs and alive chick and put them on towels with our hairdryer. 

We discussed how they need humidity AND heat in order to reach maturity and hatch, if the rest of the 5 eggs were viable. The chick we hatched ourselves would also need it for at least 24 hours. Normally in the last day or two before hatching a chick will absorb his yolk sac, the same yolk we eat which is the chicks food source while developing in the egg. Absorbing the last of it seals their umbilical cord and provides enough nutrients for 24-36 hours, which is what allows hatcheries to be able to mail chicks to customers without food or water. Michael started thinking and took the top off our climate change experiment, got a sponge wet, and created a mini incubator!!

It wasn't perfect, but it worked awesome until our neighbor brought us her incubator to borrow! Sadly the chick we broke open ourselves had not finished absorbing his yolk sac and his umbilical was not finished closing, so it tore, causing him to bleed a bit, and he only lived a few more hours. Sad day in our house, we know having farm animals means death, but it is also still sad. However, out of the other 5 possibly still viable eggs, we have hatched 3 more turkeys!! Only two eggs to go now!

Reading, reading, reading. So much happens every day. Michael was reading Garfield comics to Avery this week. 

Catan!!! Emmet got it for his birthday and it has become a huge favorite in our house! We accidently bought an expansion last year which we did not realize couldn't be played independently! So after learning the original, we learned the expansion, and now we have two more expansions headed our way in the mail!

It is such a hit it went camping, we played it every day, and the boys even taught all the co-op friends to play while camping! They also played all sorts of imaginative games in the woods between our campsites and biked so much with all the friends!

Beach FUN!! We built sand castles right at the high tide line. Each night about 930 and every morning about 830 was high tide, and we would run out at night to see how they were fairing, and then head out to the beach in the morning to check again. They spent many hours each day revising and adding to their fortresses. Emmet's first sand castle, which all the kids ended up working on the first day, never got reinforcements, and still had a tower standing by the last day!!

We also worked on work books this week, played Listography, chess, and 5 Minute Mystery. We also visited the Tillamook Cheese Factory and read all about the cheese making and ice cream making processes. We went to Blue Heron for the first time as well and pet lots of animals and explored their collection of old farm equipment. The boys really enjoyed that! 
 

Hope you had a good week,

The Dillmans