Tuesday, September 2, 2008

First Day of School

Today was Kevin's first day of school at a "real" high school. Last year at Homelink made a nice transition from full time homeschool to full time public school. We are so grateful to have had that opportunity. Unfortunately, since Kevin is a little old for those traditional "first day" pictures, I don't have a picture of Kevin to show you, but I do have a few of the other kids. It seems that even though our first official day of homeschool isn't until next week, science just couldn't wait. Grant wanted to burn a leaf with a magnifying glass. I opted for what I thought was a less flammable experiment and gave him a block of chocolate to melt. Much to my surprise, the chocolate didn't just melt, but burnt and occasionally flared up with a nice little flame.



Quincy helped supervise the experiment.

After watching the chocolate burn, I thought it would be cool to toast a marshmallow. We were surprised to find that the marshmallow was much more resistant to the heat than we thought it would be. It barely got warm and most definitely did not toast. Grant and Julia tried turning the magnifying glass to get different angles in an attempt to intensify the heat, but no luck. What we did manage to do was intensify the brightness of the light, which when reflected off of a white marshmallow was painful to look at, thus the sunglasses.
I don't know if we learned anything today, and we sure would love to know why the chocolate was so easy to burn while the marshmallow wasn't, but I think we all had fun.

4 comments:

Leslie said...

oh poor abuelita...did you make hot chocolate with her when you were done? What a fun homeschool mommy you are! Too bad there are no silly first day of school pictures of kevin. But i think you can make that right and we can pretend! :o)
is quincy supervising? she does not seem that thrilled about it in the picture. And thank goodness they are not starting any grass fires like almost happened when we were there, lol

Elizabeth said...

Haha I bet Kevin would have greatly protested if you tried to get him to stand still long enough for "First day of school" pictures... and it definitely would be interesting why the chocolate melted so much easier... hmmm maybe that's a question for Uncle Ron.

Elizabeth said...

I meant to say "Interesting to find out why the chocolate melted easier"... I guess all this talking to india is making my english drop. Oi

Grammie/Mom said...

I'm glad to see the pictures. How did Kevin's first 2 days go? Reading the experiment was interesting. Leslie's right. YOu are a fun homeschool mommy! You know what, Leslie? So are you!