Week 2 - Gemstones and Dumplings

Creative Writing

We spent most of the week listening to the remainder of our August Book, "Amari and the Night Brothers." We planned and celebrated with our first Book Club Party!

We will write about it in a different post so we can go in depth there.

You can find the post here

Science

Spa Chemistry (Kaylee): 

I continued my soap making video class on Creative Live. The teacher demonstrated how to make her special purple lavender cold process soap. She taught how to add the lye to the distilled water and how important it is to never, ever add the water to the lye.

We learned how to make trace (if you remember from the last blog entry, this is the point of where the lye water mixture is perfectly mixed into the colorants and oils). Once you make a thin trace, if you kept mixing and mixing, it would make a thicker and thicker trace until it's solid. She said that you really don't want to incorporate air into the soap when mixing. If you do, then when you cut the soap you'll find tiny bubbles in it, which is not what you want. Apparently professionals don't agree with me- tiny white bubbles aren't cool.

We also learned how to make the beautiful, purple peaks of the soap and she showed how to sprinkled the lavender on top of the peaks. Finally, she demonstrated the different ways to cut the soap- a non-serrated knife or her cutting tool thing. 

In the Q&A at the end, someone asked if you can still use her tool for melt and pour soap. She said no, melt and pour soap is harder than cold process soap, and it can break the wires in her tool.

This week I made green soap for my mom's master bathroom. We scented it to smell like lime and ginger. We tried swirling and then we tried layers. This week we learned to spritz alcohol to remove bubbles. Apparently you have to remove all of them because they do not pop by themselves. 

See the pretty ombre layers?

Elementary Science (Landen):

This week I dug out the rest of the gems.

See my hands?

This time I did it outside- our kitchen table was very messy last week!

Technology 

Photography (Kaylee):

This week I learned about lenses on my video class on Creative Live. I learned that fixed lenses come with the camera and you can't change them, you just take a picture, end of story. I also learned that interchangeable lenses can be changed. Finally, I learned about adapters, how you, in theory, can use any kind of camera (say, a Nikon or Canon) with any kind of lens (like a Pentax or Sony). But, sadly, camera brands want to do everything for you- your lens, your camera, your accessory, and they don't want a competing camera brand to take away some of that. ;)

Digital Art

This week I used a tracing pad and printed off some tracing designs.

I made an alien, four-wheeled, clawed, magnetic building machine.

Elective:

Culinary Arts (Kaylee):

This week I made...

I'm mixing the filling for the dumplings.

DUMPLINGS!!!

I used tofu for this recipe, which I'd never seen or used before. Plant meat!! The filling in the dumplings was raw pork, extra firm tofu, green onions, and seasonings. Because of the raw pork, I needed to make sure I cooked them right. I learned how to steam the dumplings in a pan. I placed cabbage on the metal steamer so the dumplings wouldn't stick. I also made a dipping sauce- soy sauce, sesame seed oil, etc. They were good!! Owen ate so many that we had to move the plate away from him so that the rest of us could try some, too!

PE (Landen):

We jumped on our tramp all week long. We played Crack The Egg, did cool flips and tricks, and tried to jump as high as we could. I did a half-cartwheel, Kaylee did a front flip, and Emberly did a somersault!

Arts and Crafts (Emberly):

This week we made windy hair people. We applied water colors in large amounts and then blew it to make crazy hair!

It was exhausting! We ran out of breath and felt light-headed.

Here is my finished project and my brother's. 

It looks crazy, huh? Crazy cool!