Day 82, 83

Shovelling, Part II

While our part of the shovelling may not have gone well, the kids did brilliantly.  They both helped clear off the cars, clear off the front stairs, and Emily cleared off Nana's bushes.  Just goes to show me that there is hope.  We did also do further thank you cards, but we have more to do, so I'm going to post a couple of pictures of them after we're done.  Two more each to do, so we're making progress!

In Other News...

Today, so far, has been what I would term a successful day.  Ok, we don't have math or English done, but we can't measure every day by that, and the day isn't over.  They seem ok at the moment knowing that they will have to sit at the table after dinner and work.  That won't change until later.

No, the reason today is a successful day is because:

A.  No one argued about going to orchestra.

B.  Everyone participated and did well at orchestra.

C.  When we got home and it was like herding cats, I didn't scream my head off.

What we did manage to do today is covering the Earth's insides.  We read some of a book called Planet Earth/Inside Out by Gail Gibbons.  It's pretty good, covering the interior of the Earth, plate tectonics, and, at the end, the three families of rock (igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary).  After we read the section about how the interior of the Earth is composed, we did a project called Edible Earth. 

We started with paper plates, which we marked out with proportionately accurate-ish lines demarcating the inner and outer cores, the mantle, and the crust.  We added the approximate temperatures of each:

We then made a plan for the edible version, deciding which food item would go where based on whether we needed solids, liquids, or both:

And voila!





The left is Emily's and the right is Luke's.  The centers are chocolate chips, to represent the solid inner core, outside of that is chocolate sauce to represent the liquid outer core, then marshmallows with a bit of sauce to represent the mostly solid mantle, and graham cracker for the Earth's crust.  The kids were very into the project, especially when they could munch on them!