Robert, Stephanie, Christopher and Amy helped with the ooooh awwwws in Justanian's family presentation.

Mike held up signs displaying the acts against colonies.

Justin and Jill, the English Parliment.

If ever I'm in a war I hope to have Jack, Travis, Joseph and Benjamin on my side. We'll all hide together and pray for peace.

Annabelle and her mom act out the First Great Awakening.

General Rob lead his troops in the French and Indian War.
Twice his fearless troops were defeated and driven back by the Indians. With Travis and Jack on his team it is hard to imagine how they failed, but alas,even the fiercest warriors are defeated sometimes.

Griffan and Cy did a great job cleaning! Thank you!

Julie, Cy and Pam!

Elinor

Jack turned 10 on January 8th!

Our masters class locked arms today and tried to pass a hula hoop
around their circle. Team building? I'm not sure. They seemed to have plenty of fun!

Miss Robin taught us about bacteria today.
She explained how we preserve foods with salt, dehydration and sometimes alcohol.

We talked about bacteria and viruses today. I told the children that I'd send you a link to show them how small they are: http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/ Just move the scrubber to zoom in and make sure you zoom back out too. Very cool.

We talked about needing beneficial bacteria in us to break down food, and eating things like yogurt to add more beneficial bacteria. We discussed the food chain with bacteria being part of the decomposers and that without bacteria we would all die in one big trash heap. However, we like things decomposing after we're done with it, not before, so we discussed the science of food preservation. Here is a good article on the different methods of food preservation:

http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/menus/food-preservation.htm
You can read this article with your children while looking in your food pantry for all the different methods of preservation. Make it a challenge to find all of it...although it might be hard to find freeze dried.

For a demonstration of chemical preservatives, we also looked at the bread we used in the densities experiment for Week 7 which was October 20. I bought the cheapest white bread at Target since we weren't eating it and it still hasn't molded! It has been sitting in my kitchen for over two months. Scary. Stay tuned for the end of the year when we check back in to see if it ever will mold.

Your children also received a petri dish with bacteria that they collected from themselves or the church. Please take out the paper in the baggie and read it carefully and record your colony counts daily. Please be careful not to open the petri dish. PLEASE BRING IT BACK NEXT WEEK!! We want to compare all the fun, gross things we collected. Hmmm, is Boaz's nose more germy than a toilet seat?

Miss Robin brought a MRE in for us to try.
Brian, Bo, Elizabeth and Elinor all prayed for Major Shaw and his troops.

Miss Tiffany shows her class how a loom
works and discusses how much more efficient a power loom is.

When Robin said "no science today, we're doing art instead" the class groaned.
The were truly disappointed that we might be skipping science.
Robin had them sting UV sensitive beads and test them. Very cool.

Does old sunscreen block UV rays.
Nope.
If it's expired it probably is not protecting your skin.
We also tested cheap sunglasses verses expensive ones.
Target $15 sunglasses worked just as well as some mega expensive ones.

Travis testing out his UV beads.

We dissected cow eyeballs today!

Douglas!

Stephanie!

Yikes! What did Miss Laura find in the science lab this morning?
Prehistoric creatures or simply cow bones from Grammy's ranch?

ROCKETS

ROCKETS!