Crystal-Growing Activities

For years now I've been wanting to repeat this activity because it's just SO COOL. But I've also been nervous because it's a little tricky to get right. Sometimes it doesn't work and then you have to patiently boil down the solution and try again. We did need to do that a couple of times, but it was so worth it! 

A couple weird stages our hot ice went through when we overheated it or crystallized it accidentally. It's okay. You can always melt it down, add a little more vinegar, and try again.

Unfortunately, the video tutorial for making hot ice which we watched last time was no longer online, but I kind of remembered what to do, and we watched this video to refresh our memories on the details. I also explain the process in my earlier blog post about it.

Crystals are a great lead-in to talking about the relationship between temperature and pressure (you can also talk about this with respect to geysers). This video is cool, about how a pressure cooker or Instant Pot works. The same principle applies deep inside the earth, and allows water to become superheated or supersaturated with mineral solvents.

Another activity I've always wanted to do is growing a crystal from a seed crystal. It is pretty easy. First, you just grow some small alum crystals, and then pick one of them and suspend it in the supersaturated alum solution. It is all outlined in this tutorial. 

Here are the small alum crystals. They're so pretty--like ice that doesn't melt, or like little diamonds. My children loved playing with them.

We picked out a nice biggish one to serve as our seed crystal. Then we suspended it with fishing line in the alum solution, like this:

We watched it for several days, and it grew a little each day. It was really cool! When we finally took it out of the solution, it was so big and beautiful! Here it is:

We loved the flat faces it developed—like a diamond!

We learned about how crystals grow bigger when left to grow slowly and undisturbed (intrusive vs extrusive mineral growth). Here's an example: we grew salt crystals on two pieces of cardboard (you just soak the cardboard in a supersaturated salt water solution). (See also here.) One was left outside to dry/crystallize in the sun and wind, and one was protected inside a warm oven. You can see the one that grew slower (on the right in this picture) had much bigger crystals! This is like what happens with basalt vs. granite.

Close up of those salt crystals on the right—I love how nicely cubic they are!

And here are some under a microscope. Beautiful!

Looking at crystals under a microscope is such an interesting thing to do. They become even more beautiful when you put a polarizing filter over your eyepiece so you can see the colors (birefringence). You can learn more about this and find instructions here.

These are citric acid crystals

Epsom salt crystals

And sugar crystals.

Epsom salt crystals, not under the microscope. You can learn how to grow these here or here. They grow really fast!

Another example of "intrusive" and "extrusive" crystal growth, this time with sugar. Instructions for this experiment are here, and you can learn more about the process in geology here. 

Here is the hot sugar solution while it's still cooling—you can see the surface has cooled more quickly than what's underneath, forming these cool surface wrinkles. Sometimes pahoehoe lava has wrinkles like this too!

And here we have the smoother, small extrusive crystals on the left, and the bigger intrusive ones on the right.

You can also make melted sugar that cools so quickly, it doesn't have time to form crystals at all! This is similar to obsidian. You can learn how to do that here. It is so pretty! And the children love to break off pieces and eat it. :)

Crystals are so cool. Find more crystal-growing activities here!

Construction Unit Study and Lesson Plan

I knew a unit on Construction would be fun for 3-year-old Teddy (and his grown-up counterpart, 12-year-old Sebastian) but I didn't anticipate how interesting ALL of us would find it! We have a few friends who are in the field of construction management, so we loved talking to them and getting to know a little more about what a construction career is like.

A few miscellaneous links:

Here are some answers to your burning questions about cement and concrete

This video shows the process and sequence of house construction 

This PVC house looks like something Seb would love to build. Maybe we'll try it another time.

Here's one of a zillion videos you can watch showing tiny houses for sale. They are so cute! I knew this was kind of becoming a trend, but I didn't know HOW popular these tiny houses have gotten. Apparently there are whole reality shows about them, etc.

We always like a good implosion/demolition video! There are more demolition resources here, from our Fireworks Unit. The girls did this same demolition activity with blocks again, and they loved it!

This bridge demolition was pretty cool too (done with heavy equipment, not explosives).

Some pictures of the night we had a guest speaker who is an Estimator for a construction company:

Kids listening to our guest speaker (enthralled) :)

He showed us his construction estimating software, and even bought some huge floor plans/blueprints for us to look at! It was awesome.

Etiquette Unit Study and Lesson Plan

We felt that all of the children could benefit from a little brush-up on their Etiquette skills! This was a fun little unit, ending with lunch at a (somewhat) fancy restaurant for practice, at which there was only one incident where a gentlemen shoved a lady off her chair, hissing "I was there first!" at her…so…pretty good? :)

You can look at the lesson plan for more specifics, but we really enjoy The Art of Manliness blog for gentleman's etiquette and just all-around interesting information. We watched MANY of their videos, but ones we particularly liked were:

• this one about the proper way to iron a dress shirt (which we practiced, but the little ones practiced on napkins. I remember my mom having me practice ironing on tablecloths and napkins when I was little, too!)

• this video about table manners, and
• this one on how to end a conversation (such a useful skill!)

But by all means do go and check out their other offerings on such subjects as how to chop wood and how to unclog a toilet! :)

Here is a nice formal place setting from our fancy dinner at home

And some more links:

Article about opening doors for women

A funny old (but still good) instructional video about manners

This page links to several etiquette guides from earlier eras. These were fun to read.

Jeeves! The ultimate expert on sartorial etiquette.

This old WWII-era film on handkerchief etiquette was quirky

Daisy, at the aforementioned fancy restuarant

Percussion

Ever since I was in high school, playing in a percussion ensemble of my own, I have loved going to the BYU Percussion concerts, and I've always wanted to take my children to one! The college has added a group specializing in Eastern music since I was there, and that is really strange and interesting (though the regular Percussion Ensemble is still my favorite). The steel drums group, Panoramic Steel, is always really fun too.

So, we made sure to schedule a field trip to the "Evening of Percussion" concert during this unit. We loved it! And the children were using my mallets and drumsticks to drum on everything for the next few weeks…but that was inevitable, of course. :)

A few other percussion-related resources:

This is an interesting video about a day in the life of a symphonic percussionist

Demonstrations of how to play African log drums.

We looked up videos of pretty much every percussion instrument on YouTube, just so we could hear what each one sounded like. It's interesting to hear the difference between a marimba and a xylophone, for example, or glockenspiel and celesta.

Here's a sample of a piece written for water percussion

You've probably heard of this percussion group called "Stomp." They create percussion music with all kinds of "junk" like garbage cans and brooms, and with their bodies too. We watched a couple videos of this and the children liked it. (I played a percussion piece in high school where we just clapped, drummed on our knees, stomped, pounded on our stomachs, etc. to create the music, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever!)

Have you heard this piece by John Cage for prepared piano? So weird and cool. I've always wanted to play something for prepared piano.

And of course, there's also Cage's famous piece 4'33", which consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of just…silence. Or rather, all the ambient sounds—people coughing, programs rustling, etc—ARE the music. It's one of those avant-garde concepts that cause lots of arguments about "what is music"—but you can't argue that the idea is interesting! I've always thought it would be fun to hear this one performed live.

Carl Nielsen's 5th Symphony has a really cool snare drum part—the snare drummer is basically directed to "fight against" the conductor of the piece in one section. The drum part calls for wild, ad-libbed drumming, even playing in a different time signature than the rest of the orchestra, and without regard to what the rest of the musicians are doing. It's a symbol of war and chaos. Eventually the drummer is "defeated" by the rest of the music and goes offstage, still playing. You can read descriptions of the piece here and here. And you can listen to it here (for that crazy snare drum part, start at about 15:40)

And here is a video of the children drumming on the couch and other things. They really love doing this and they love watching videos of themselves doing it. :)

Field trip: echoes and pyrite in Ophir Canyon

One of the things I found most interesting in this sound book I read was the way the author talked about listening—really listening—to the sounds around us. He talked about how different places in the world have distinct sonic characters in the same way they have distinguishing visual characteristics, and he described having his students go on "sound walks" while blindfolded, so they could experience a place acoustically, kind of like you'd do a "nature walk" to see birds or something. This seemed like the coolest idea to me! So we tried it in various places: near a busy construction site, in our neighborhood, in a downtown area, and then in a more remote country area by my friend Cathy's house. The sounds in each place were so different! It made me think about how much the sounds are part of the experience when we go camping, or hiking. It's so peaceful to be somewhere where all you hear is wind and birdsong!

While we were in Tooele County, we went to a place we'd been wanting to go: Ophir Canyon, where our rockhounding guide assured us there is pyrite to be found! We always welcome the chance to find cool rocks, and this was a really easy site because the roads getting there are all paved, and you can find all kinds of pyrite just in the pile of mine tailings by the road!

Teddy got one of the rocks and walked around talking on it like it was a phone. Very businesslike.

And, as an added bonus for our Sound Unit, we discovered some great places to hear echoes in this canyon! You can hear them in this video:

Anechoic and Reverberation Chambers field trip

When I was little, my dad would sometimes take me over to the Science Building where he worked at BYU, and show me all the coolest things: the top of the pendulum, the giant ground sloth skeleton, the wave machine, and best of all the anechoic chamber. I LOVED going into this room where there were no echoes, no outside sounds—only the most silent, muffled air I'd ever experienced. And I would have given anything if, for this field trip, I could have just called up Dad and asked him to get out his key and go with us to the anechoic chamber again! But…now that he's gone…we had to go through the regular channels. And it wasn't too hard: you can just sign up for a tour here at the BYU Acoustics Outreach page. On the night we went, we were the only people in the group, so it was great.

The anechoic chamber has been remodeled since I was young: back then it was all made of yellow insulation, and the foam pieces weren't quite so aggressively triangular! So it was cool for me to see this updated version. Our tour guide was really knowledgeable and answered all the children's questions with great patience. (The little ones were kind of nervous about the wire mesh floor, and I remember feeling just the same when I was young! It feels very precarious. It's actually strong, though—they can put a grand piano on it with no problem!)

My only regret on this field trip was that I didn't get to walk around yelling and shouting with as much wild abandon as I felt like I could when I was there with my dad. :) And I wish I had thought to make a recording while we were in there! But, never fear: here is a recording made in another university's anechoic and reverberation chambers which will give you the idea.

Another bonus was that, unbeknownst to me, BYU now also has a reverberation chamber, which is basically the opposite of the anechoic chamber. And that was really cool too!

You can see all the hard angled surfaces they have hanging above the floor, all to increase reverberation.

The most amazing thing in this room was the demonstration our guide gave us of standing waves. He turned on a loudspeaker that put out a loud, low sound, and then we walked around the room listening. Because of the reverberation, the waves reflect back on themselves, and that means they sometimes make nodes, or places where the peaks and troughs of the waves actually cancel each other out. We had understood this in theory, but experiencing it in real life was really striking! You'd walk around, wanting to cover your ears because of the loudness of the sound, and then suddenly you'd come to a spot where the sound just…dampened. It became almost soft, as if you'd covered your ears or walked into a different room. And those places were the nodes. We loved this!

I didn't record that phenomenon, but here is a short sample of how a voice sounds in the reverberation chamber: 

Insect Unit Schedule and Lesson Plan

Ever since we started homeschooling, I have had this vague idea that no one ought to leave school without having made an insect collection! I'm not sure why. It just seems like one of those things…one must do! So, now we have finally gotten around to it and we can just close up shop and call it good, I guess! :)

My little Juniper just started kindergarten "officially" this year (she's been hanging around while the other kids have school for a long time, of course) and this seemed like a fun unit for her to start with. There are loooooots of ideas online for "bug activities" and crafts, but most of them are geared for quite a young audience! And since we tend to do a lot of stuff directed to the older kids, it was nice to find some cute little kindergarten-style crafts for Junie's sake. Although…honestly…the older kids really seemed to enjoy the simple little crafts too. I think it's relaxing for them to just sit and make collages, or play with pipe cleaners, sometimes. I sometimes join them myself!

Fall was a great time to study insects. The weather is so lovely and mild that it's a pleasure to be outside, and the insects haven't flown away or gone into dormancy or whatever yet. And I must say our insect collection turned out way better than I anticipated. I pictured a few sad-looking bugs in a box, like I had when I was in school (although I was very proud of mine…thus my feeling that it was a "must-do," probably)—but we ordered some great supplies and got a beautiful-looking display box, and it made all the difference! Sebastian has probably been the most enthusiastic worker on the collection, and he has arranged it and made it really beautiful! So it has been fun.

Here's my Pinterest board for the Insect Unit.

We really enjoyed a series of short animated videos from a show called "Minuscule," which I think is/was a French animated show? You can find lots of them on YouTube. In fact, I tried to buy a DVD of some collected shows, but it is only made for the other kind of DVD player (Region 4 or 2 or whatever it is). But if you search for "Minuscule" on YouTube you'll find a bunch. 

Here is an example of one of our favorites, about bees, called "Le Convoi." Many, many of the others were very fun as well.

There is also a movie made by the same creators (and featuring many of the same insect characters) called "Valley of the Lost Ants." This one WILL work on U.S. DVD players and we quite liked it. There are almost no words, just lovely animation. It reminds me in tone of the documentary Microcosmos, which I saw for the first time at BYU (International Cinema!) and loved. (I think I read somewhere that the Minuscule people were inspired by Microcosmos, so that makes sense.) We watched "Valley of the Lost Ants" for our Insect Celebration at the end of the unit.

Goldie drew this darling picture of some insects :)

This chart helped us keep it all straight...

Debt: national, personal, and spiritual

Debt is such a relevant subject. There's a temporal and a spiritual component to it. And since it's our children who are saddled with most of the burden of the national debt, it seems only fair to teach them about it!

Here's a good video about the debt limit.

And this is a good one on the national debt and the deficit.

This video introduces the Laffer Curve and how lower taxes leads to higher revenue.

Related: social security.

Very interesting question: is consumption actually good for the economy?

I love this video about the broken window fallacy.

(I posted this on the Inflation post too.) It seems like everyone asks this question at some point or other: "why can't we just print more money?" And it's surprisingly hard (for me) to explain! This video does it pretty well.

On the more spiritual side, there's this good article on getting out of debt and its spiritual implications

Here is President Hinckley's great talk about putting our houses in order. I think everyone should read this before getting married!

I also love Joseph B. Wirthlin's talk about earthly and heavenly debts.

And here's another good video illustrating the great debt we owe to Jesus Christ.

Economic Systems, the Free Market, and Trade

I don't expect anyone to follow my garbled lecture notes here! There is quite a lot left out. But I was pleased with the way this discussion went. It is interesting to consider the idea of a Utopia or a Zion society. It's been the goal of so many, and yet most of those people have been lacking the ONLY thing that makes such a society possible: a change in human nature. And that, of course, only comes through Jesus Christ, and through our own agency. It is literally impossible to compel this change in others! And it's impossible to purely self-will it. Only the combination of our own desire and Christ's mercy allows the mighty change of heart that makes Zion possible. Which is why any secular Utopia must ultimately fail.

Anyway, on to more political things. Economic Systems and Trade!

My first introduction to Karl Marx came through Monte Python, I'm pleased to say. And I've never forgotten it. All through AP European History and other classes, I would repeat to myself, "The struggle of class against class is a what struggle? A what struggle?" "A…political struggle." It helped me through many an exam. Here's the video.

This talk, about the difference between the United Order (a sort of communal society attempted in early Latter-day Saint history) and Socialism, is interesting. Anyone who says these two systems are basically the same is missing some vital information!

Here's an old, but good, video about how the stock market works. I love this old style of movies.

When you talk about investment, it's also a good time to read the Parable of the Talents from the Bible and discuss how we can invest and enlarge ourselves spiritually! This is a good discussion of the parable, as is this. And this. And this. I like pondering all the different applications one parable can have.

Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" series was really influential a couple decades ago, I think (and is still very applicable). I love the guy. This video, about how the free market helps people around the world, is great.

Here's Thomas Sowell on income inequality, and here's another one on the same topic.

I, Pencil. This video is a classic about trade and how it enriches all of our lives.

And here's another take on the same subject: How to make a $1500 sandwich in only 6 months

The Morality of Capitalism. And another (the children really liked this one). Ooh! And this one too. (Nice shout-out to our man Adam Smith, too.)

I posted this on another page, but it fits here too: This article is fascinating. It relates to the free market, but also gives a good perspective on how grateful we should be for what we have. We are so abundantly rich compared to any other people on earth before!

And it's always great to hear Milton Friedman in his own words. Here he talks about a glaring problem with socialism: where are "the angels" who will carry it out?

Another look at some of the problems with socialism.

What is the best Minimum wage?

Another of these sort of old-fashioned movies that seems a bit funny now, but the principles in it are sound. Why socialism doesn't work.

What's all this talk about the "trade deficit"?

And yes, I do get into all these subjects with my children, and they love it! I don't know how normal that is; perhaps it's strange, but maybe because they're subjects I find fascinating, the children love to talk about economics and politics. "Tell us something else about whiny college students," they will say, hopefully, at the breakfast table. :)

Cardiovascular System Unit Study and Lesson Plan

This unit had a lot of content but very few pictures, for some reason. I do have a few other posts I will put up, but I'll link most of the videos and other content we used here.

Also, we combined a short treatment of the immune system with this unit, since the blood cells play such a big role. We talked about viruses and bacteria, and immune response. We may study that more fully in the future.

First and foremost, I MUST mention this group of videos that the children LOVED. At first they just thought the videos were silly. They kept saying things like, "Hey, the blood cells can't fly in little ships!" "Hey, germs don't say 'heh heh heh'!"—and so forth. But then the children caught the spirit of the thing and began to love the videos with a deep and abiding love. It seems like maybe the episodes are from a British TV program called "Once Upon a Time Life"? I'm not totally sure. There are other episodes that show other parts of the body, but we just focused on the applicable ones to this unit. We got to know and love all the characters quite a bit. The action is kind of slow but it's all part of the charm! As is the music. And the explanations are actually quite good.

Here are the episodes we watched (I'm just linking Part I of each episode, but parts 2 and 3 for each one should come up on the "other videos" menu at the right side of your screen. Or maybe you can just search online for "once upon a time life" and you'll find whole episodes somewhere. Each episode is about 30 minutes long).

Once Upon a Time Life: The Tiny Platelets

Once Upon a Time Life: The Vaccination

Once Upon a Time Life: The Heart

Once Upon a Time Life: The Blood

Once Upon a Time Life: Breathing

Other than these gems, we also liked:

this video on how the heart pumps blood

this, on how a wound heals itself

and this (annoying, but understandable) video about blood types

Here are instructions on how to make a simple stethoscope. This totally didn't work for us, but maybe it will for you! Luckily we had this stethoscope of our own and the children enjoyed listening to each others' hearts with it.

Here you can hear the sounds of various heart murmurs. It's amazing that doctors can hear and distinguish these!

Another thing that didn't work for us: this heart pump model with the four soda bottles. Maybe our bottles were too small? Anyway, there's a whole good lesson plan with it, so this page is definitely worth a look.

Another heart pump model we didn't try.

You can make this model of a drop of blood.

Cell vs. virus

Did you know even bacteria (in this case, e. coli) can get a virus?

Cool video of a white blood cell chasing bacteria

This interactive site helps you visualize the size of a red blood cell (among other things)

Of course it's always nice to compare healthy lungs to smokers' lungs:

here

and here

Interesting article on artificial hearts

I've always thought it was fascinating how heart cells can beat all by themselves, and then sync when they get in proximity to one another. You can see a video here.

For a field trip during this unit, I called the Red Cross to see if the children could come watch me donate blood. We set it up during a less-busy time of day, and they were really great to work with me and allow the children to be close by. Our nurse was great—explaining stuff to them, letting them feel my bag of blood, etc. I'm not very squeamish about it and I like donating blood, so I didn't mind. Of course, most of all, the children liked getting pretzels and juice afterwards (the nurse kindly said they could have some, even though THEY weren't the ones who did the donating!). :) You can find a place to donate blood on the Red Cross website.

And here's my Cardiovascular System Unit Pinterest page.

Commercial Aircraft

Ever since the boys got interested in planes, they've been pointing them out in the sky all the time (we live right on the flight path toward the airport). At first I didn't believe they could actually tell what kind of planes they were seeing from the ground, but after a while I was forced to accept that indeed, they could. I asked them to tell me how to identify the different types of commercial aircraft, and they came up with this sheet (Seb drew the various engine configurations, and I wrote down what they told me was significant about each plane).

Of course, there are many more planes than this, but this lists all the ones we commonly see around here, around with a few others of their favorites. As you can see, they thought the best way to organize them was by how many engines each plane had, and where they were located. (I confess, though, even with this sheet I have a hard time knowing what I'm seeing in the sky! Maybe my eyes are not as sharp as theirs.)

On one of the days, we drove up to the Salt Lake Airport to do some planespotting. We found some good areas to watch the runways, but unfortunately went at a time when there were not many flights going out or coming in. We plan to go back sometime soon at a busier time of day! (We read somewhere that evenings from 4-7 is a pretty busy time.) Still, we had fun looking at the parts of the airport we rarely see, and getting up close to things like the runway lights.

Here's a place where the aviation firefighters practice. I like this blackened fuselage they use for (presumably?) putting out fires and evacuating people and so forth.

Goldie was just happy to be there

Runway approach lights

We watched several documentaries about Commercial Airplanes we are interested in. (My great-uncle, recently deceased, worked for Boeing for years and years. I remember loving to hear all his stories when I was younger, and I think my brothers even got to go in their flight simulator once. I wish we had had him around to teach us during this unit!)

This one about the Airbus A380 (Ky's favorite plane) has one of the guys from "Top Gear" in it. We liked it and it was very entertaining (sort of like "Mythbusters" or something), although Abe did comment afterwards that if he never heard about another Mongol Bow, it would be too soon for him!

I don't know where I was in the year 2000, but apparently I missed the huge news about the Concorde crash in France. Or maybe I heard about it and just didn't care. Anyway, I thought this documentary (one of several shows on this disc; we didn't watch the others) about the Concorde was FASCINATING. I looked up a bunch more articles about it afterwards. I really love the Concorde and I wish they would revive commercial supersonic flight! This article suggests that Airbus might be doing just that. I hope they win out over the stupid regulations and ill-informed environmental naysayers.

This video is about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Abe loves these. It's such a modern-looking plane. I'd like to fly on one.

This video is about airplane crashes. I was slightly worried that it would be scary or disturbing, but my children are so fascinated with such things! And it wasn't scary. It did a good job of showing all the safety precautions that are in place, and how they are improving all the time.

This one is cool—it shows the strip-down and overhaul of a Boeing 747. I can't believe all the intricate systems that are checked and re-checked, mostly by hand, in one of these huge airplanes!

Biggest airplane in the world: the Antonov AN225. It's just amazing that this thing even flies! (This one is Malachi's OTHER favorite.)