February Science Fun (and a few other things)

A quick overview of some of the fun stuff we do here at Casa Burns for school.

Gavin selects the appropriate day of the week sign and posts it. The kids helped decorate them (and the wall too, as you can see. Apparently dry erase marker is only erasable if it is on the dry erase board.)


Gavin is learning to read, so he helps make some of his own flash cards. We use these to make silly sentences and help him learn new words.


Gwydion is preparing materials for our melting point experiment: ice, milk chocolate and crayon.

As you can tell, he's very excited. We didn't have a thermometer fancy enough to accurately measure the temperature so we estimated time instead. Given roughly equal amounts of ingredients and a constant temperature, his hypothesis was that the ice would melt first, the chocolate next and the crayon last.

Melting chocolate. It made us all hungry. Yum.

Melting crayon bits. Stinky, in case you wondered.

End results: Gwydion's hypothesis was correct. We also made some chocolates (eaten before the photo) and some neat crayon shapes.

Silly Gavin shows off a puzzle he completed on his own.

Since Gwydion finished The Magic Tree House: Night Under the Volcano a few days ago, we decided to see if we could build our own.

Gwydion helps mix the ingredients.

And pours them on top of the baking soda.

Foamy 'lava' boiled out.

Gwydion the Scientist is very proud of himself.

So it has been a while!

It appears that I haven't updated the blog since November. That means no pics of Gavin's birthday or Christmas. Since most of you have seen those on Facebook, I'll skip to something a little more current.

We've been incredibly busy lately, with homeschooling two active kids, working and generally keeping up with things. That and we had the snowstorm of the century, followed by a record-setting 100 degree change in temperature in one week's time. At one point just last week, it was colder here than it was in the South Pole and we had nearly two feet of snow on the ground. Today's high is around 75. Crazy.

In any case, since Oklahoma has very little in the way of massive snow-moving equipment, we spent much of the time housebound. For most of the time, Michael couldn't even get to work, though he did work from home for a few days. When the temps weren't in the negatives, we took the kids out to play in the snow. Thank goodness Santa had the foresight to give them sleds for Christmas! I'm not sure how he knew we'd be able to use them this year. Many years there just isn't enough snow. That obviously wasn't a problem this time around. We did worry a bit that we'd lose Gavin in a snowdrift though.

These photos range from mid January to last week.


We got a light dusting of snow around the 10th. The boys were desperate to sled, despite the fact that we had more mud than snow. It was messy but fun.



Not too long after that, we got hit with the first big blast. Just about everything was closed. There was so much snow that we were able to pull the kids down the street on their sleds.




And of course, Mother Nature decided that wasn't enough, so we got another massive snowfall. We had so much snow in the back yard that we couldn't see the edge of the deck.


Yes, we really did have 2 feet of snow on the ground. Gwydion also discovered the hard way that snow in the pants is very, very cold.

Gavin climbed a snowy mountain.

And crawled through a snowy tunnel.

We also spent a few afternoons at the park at the end of ours street, sledding down the hill. Note the incredibly bright sunshine. All this snow happened in short cloudy periods- perhaps two days at a time. The rest of the time it was miserably cold and windy but very, very sunny.


Now of course, it is feeling more like spring. The boys have played outside almost every day this week, most of the time without jackets. They even wanted to turn the sprinkler on! I'll try to get some good pics of them enjoying the beautiful weather and get another post up soon.