Honey tasting activity

It's always good to talk about bees! We had a whole unit on them once (Pinterest board for that here) and maybe will again sometime—there's lots to learn! But this was just part of our Flower Unit. Our honey-tasting activity was a favorite for everyone this time. We ordered a bunch of different honeys from Smiley Honey (they have a good selection of sampler sets here, or you can choose your own) and after tasting them all, enjoyed eating them on our toast for a long time afterwards (though not as long as you'd HOPE—it went fast!).

They were all good, but some favorites for their unique taste were the sourwood honey, the coriander honey, and the orange honey. But really, we liked them all! I like to order large bottles of the tupelo honey because it doesn't crystallize, or at least not very fast.

They can have very different colors as well as flavors!

We tasted each kind plain first—I went around and drizzled some into each child's spoon. The we got out the bread and had our favorites on that.

The little boys were glad to participate in this with us. Yum!

Making Paper Flowers

There are tons of paper flower tutorials online! This was the basic tutorial we used. It's not QUITE as easy as the video makes it seem (is it ever?) but it wasn't hard, and once the kids got the hang of it they had fun customizing their flowers and trying to make specific kinds. I love Goldie's dandelions, above, with even one of them that's gone to seed!

Daisy made a black-eyed Susan and some baby's breath.

They were teeeeeny! I don't know if you can tell how small.

She even put it on a real flower stem

Sometimes, as here, we forgot to round of the tips of the petals. It doesn't look as good.

Fun activity!

Flower Unit Study (II)

The very first homeschool unit we ever did was on Flowers! We've studied plants in lots of ways since then, with a unit on trees, a general botany unit, even honeybees. But it felt like a good time to come back to flowers. We talked about fruit and other parts of plants as well.

Click to enlarge!

Here's my Flowers and Plants Pinterest Board

We dissected flowers, which is always interesting

Talked about the Fibonacci sequence in nature

We visited our friend's beautiful yard—she loves gardening and knows a lot about flowers!

She also showed us inside her cool studio where she does flower illustrations, among other things

Her hydrangeas were huge!

We tried dyeing flowers, with…moderate success. This never turns out as dramatic as you'd like. I think TONS of food coloring is the way to go, but maybe flower shops that dye flowers have other tricks too.

We grew microgreens

And collected water through transpiration

Jerusalem Unit Study

We started out the year with a mini-unit on Jerusalem. We'd learned about Ancient Civilizations the year before and I just wanted to finish out, very briefly, our knowledge about what happened in the Middle East after the fall of Greece and Rome. We were going to finish our unit with watching the "Jerusalem" IMAX movie (which is very good; I've seen it before and loved it)—but the place we were going to watch it actually cancelled their showings and closed the movie a week earlier than their website said, so that was disappointing. We had fun learning a little about modern Israel and eating some Israeli foods, though!

 

Back-to-school Dinner

 

I have seen and liked other peoples' ideas of back-to-school dinners in the past. But I've never felt a desire to do our own. Until this year! Suddenly I wanted to. Maybe it was the fact that it was Seb's last year of school…or I felt an urging to reset some expectations…I'm not sure what it was. But I thought of some words of wisdom to share (ha ha) to go along with the theme of Linked Together—something I've been really wanting for our family lately. For us to help each other. Be a team. When one rejoices, we all rejoice; when one suffers, we all suffer. And that's what I built our dinner around. (The words of wisdom were little heeded, and in fact barely listened to, I'm sorry to say—but I made the attempt, anyway.)

We had fun decorating! The girls helped me blow up these funny chain balloons, and make colorful paper chains.

Each and every member of the family was happy to be there.

Daisy and Junie wanted to dress up, so they did!

Linked together. Vegetable and chicken kebabs. It kind of fits!

And we had the best chicken souvlaki and grilled vegetables with tzatziki and whipped feta dip for dinner!

Ancient Phoenicians and glassmaking

I didn't really know anything about the Phoenicians before this unit. We learned about two things they're famous for, their glassmaking and their purple dye (Phoenician purple or Tyrian purple)! 

I had heard, of course, about purple being the color of kings, and I knew the dye for it was really expensive. But I didn't know WHY. This article shows a man who has revived the ancient technique—which involves murex snail shells in HUGE quantities, extracting their glands, fermenting them, letting them sit in the sun for a little while but not too long, cooking them, etc.—and now I finally understand! https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/oddly-enough/tunisian-enthusiast-recreates-sea-snail-purple-dye-that-defined-ancient-royals-2022-02-08/

I also didn't know how beautiful the purple color was. You can see why it was so loved!

This picture is from that man's Facebook page—it's cool to look at his pictures and see the bottles of beautiful powdered dye, etc. That article says that it takes 119  pounds of murex shells to produce a single gram of Tyrian purple!!

The other thing the Phoenicians were famous for was glassmaking. I love glassmaking (the Museum of Glass is one of my favorite museums we've ever visited!), but didn't know anywhere local we could go to watch it. So we just watched a bunch of videos.

This one is really interesting because it shows the technique the Phoenicians used—core-formed glass. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBZb2bkn4KU

This just shows the making of a glass pitcher (not core-formed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtxrtKd-Vao

This video, "Glass skills with Bill," shows how to use honey to practice the rolling technique of keeping molten glass on your rod. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz1sUH7wDvA&t=2s 

And that gave me an idea! The honey reminded me of melted sugar, or caramel. I wondered if we could use hot caramel to mimic molten glass and try some of the glassmaking techniques! Then I found a recipe for sugar glass and that seemed like it would be perfect! This is the glass they use in movies when someone has to crash through a window or something. It breaks just like glass, but without the cost (and it's not quite as sharp, so less likely to cause injury).

We tried this recipe: https://www.inthekitchenwithmatt.com/edible-sugar-glass and it was a great success! I had just been hoping to move and mold the "glass" around a little, but Daisy had the idea of trying to actually blow it with metal straws, and it worked! I couldn't believe it! The blown "glass" doesn't hold its shape; it collapses almost immediately, but we made a few balls and bubbles with it and it definitely got the idea across. Very, very fun. 

You have to be careful, because it's very hot, of course, but this was one of our favorite projects during this unit!

This is cool too—Sugar stained glass https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt8PhT-DMyE&t=45s

A little handle, like you'd make on a glass pitcher

Sugar-glass bubble! This one was actually thick enough to last. It finally shattered when we poked it—it looked so cool!

Thinner glass bubbles that shrunk into themselves as soon as the girls stopped blowing

A beautiful sheet of sugar glass! The Phoenicians would have been proud.