A Little Bit of Football and A Whole Lot of Pumpkin Spice

Language Arts

October's Book is Before the Ever After by Jacqueline Woodson. Before the Ever After is the moving account of a son learning to accept that his father has a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). We learned about how the NFL has been embroiled in controversy ever since football- related head injuries were discovered.

Science:

Spa Chemistry (Kaylee):

This week I learned how to make candles! I am going to make some this week and next week so that we can put them in our pumpkins!!

I didn't know how much wax I needed to fill these candle molds, so I used a trick I found on the internet. I filled my molds up with water and then measured how much water there was: 5 fluid oz. Then I weighed out 5 oz. of candle wax.

I melted the wax on the stove until it was 185 degrees Fahrenheit, then took it off the stove. I put in a few orange color chips from my DIY candle making kit to dye the wax and then poured it into my molds.

I used the popsicle sticks to keep the wicks in place as the wax dried.

I realized that I'd filled the molds too much and that the popsicle stick would turn out imprinted on the top of the candle. I took the sticks off, scooped out a little of the liquid wax, and then put the sticks back on.

I added a couple more color chips to my second batch because the first batch was a really light color!

Elementary Science (Landen):

This week I helped mom in her garden!

Her potatoes had grown, so we dug them out.

It was kind of like my gemstone kit, but we get to eat what we find! (Unless it's a worm. 😉)

This big white thing is the stalk. Down by it's roots, the potatoes grow.

We found lots of potatoes! I loved learning about how they grow!

See the bubble-like thing bulging out of the top of the tube? That's a meniscus!

Of course, you can never have too much science. This week I opened my Tiny Science kit. I dropped water into my tiny test tubes. I learned that where water meets air, the water molecules clump together and form a meniscus (kind of like a water skin). When you try to dump it out, it won't fall out! When you shake the tube, it breaks the tension and the water slides out.

I also learned how to break a meniscus. You put a tiny drop of soap on the bottom of the test tube and then fill it up with water. The soap stops a meniscus from forming and you can dump the water out easily! 

I got water and colored it with four different colors of food coloring. I put different amounts of sugar into the colors and layered them into a different-sized test tube.

I mixed up a couple of the colors and they blurred together. But the green and the blue (the bottom color) stayed separate!

Technology

Digital Photography (Kaylee):

I learned about specialty lenses on Creative Live. I learned about fisheye lenses, which create a circle or oval look, and tilt & shift lenses, which means the lens can "tilt" up and down, or "shift" from side to side. If you tilt the lens down, you get more depth of field, and if you tilt it up, you get shallower depth of field. If you shift the lens and take three pictures- one of the left side of a landscape, one of the middle, and one of the right side, you can edit later and combine the three to get one continuous landscape with no distortion like you would get with a standard lens. You can also correct a common problem with a tilt and shift lens. When you tilt your camera (not the lens, the actual camera) to snap a shot of the top of a building, it looks like the building gets smaller the higher it goes. With a tilt and shift, you can hold your camera straight and tilt the lens up, which gets rid of the distortion because you aren't tilting your camera up.

Digital Art (Landen):

I finished my animation and added some cool explosion sound effects!

Elective

Culinary Arts (Kaylee):

This week I made some pumpkin cookies and a maple cream cheese frosting! Which, by the way, was DELICIOUS!!!

My skill of the week was using an offset spatula to spread the frosting onto the cookies. It was really hard but I eventually got it!

It's weird to eat a pumpkin cookie and not have chocolate chips in it, but the frosting was even better than it sounded. In two days, the cookies mysteriously disappeared... ;)

My Radish kit also included a bonus recipe: a coffee-free pumpkin spice latte! The recipe called for 2 teaspoons of pumpkin spice, but I think I miscounted and put 3 teaspoons. Whoops! It was very pumpkin spice-y.

P.E.(Landen):

This week I played hopscotch with my siblings!

Watch out, boys!

We had a really good time!

Arts and Crafts (Emberly):

This week- yet another apple craft!

We glued popsicle sticks as apple cores and cut out little felt apple skins.

We cut out little apple seeds, stems, and leaves out of paper and glued them on.

It is so cute!