The Diosa Dotada Endeavor

We spent last week doing a great deal of chemistry.  We’ve been reading out of two major spines and have found a couple of errors or over-simplifications between them; one thanks to a friend and former chemical engineer and the other as a result of the time honored gum drop and toothpick molecule building activity.  One of the compounds Athena wanted to build was NaCl– sodium chloride or table salt.  Her text had stated that not all molecules are compounds, which we found to be true.  Hydrogen gas is in molecular form consisting of two hydrogen atoms each.  Ozone molecules are made of three oxygen atoms.  They contain more than one atom, hence a molecule.  But they only contain one element or ingredient so they are not compounds.  The text also stated that all compounds are molecules.  Thanks to Athena’s table salt desires, we realized that this is a bit oversimplified as the single molecule concept is much less clear when ionic compounds like NaCl for crystalline structures where the forces between individual molecules are equally strong as they are inside the molecule, creating a lattice.  This happens a lot, where seeking answers to Athena’s series of questions causes us to get a bit ahead of where we are at and cause us to spiral back around through the material later.  Gum drop molecules and compounds, needless to say, were hours of fun last week.  We exhausted two packages of gum drops and I added Molymods to her Yuletide wishlist.  We also made a trip to the library and found a series of books with one volume on each element.  The series doesn’t contain the whole Periodic Table, but has most of the more common elements and a few of the rarer ones.  We’ve been hopping around the table, reading aloud about various elements that have peaked her interest.  Plus our little Chemistry club got together, played element related games and invoked the spirit of Dimitri Mendeleev by getting started on working through a Periodic Table puzzle.  Athena, with her love of patterns, has found a kindred spirit in the man who identified the best patterns to use to organize both the known elements from his time and the predicted elements that would be identified in the future.

We attended our first workshop at the art museum and found it to be far superior to what the zoo is offering homeschoolers.  I only wish I had signed us up for more than three workshops this year.  All three children truly enjoyed the experience, but the one I was blown away by was Artemis.  They offered the children the opportunity to separate into two groups with the three year old and younger crowd going with one staff member and the older children with another.  Athena was a bit nervous at first and asked me to please accompany her.  I agreed and talked with Apollo and Artemis about their options.  Apollo chose to stay with me, but Artemis confidently set off with the younger group all by herself.  Her ferocious independence is breath-taking at times.  I went with Athena and Apollo on the older children’s tour and thoroughly enjoyed it myself.  When we met back up in the classroom for the hands-on project, the staff member who had been with the younger children asked me if I was going to bring Artemis back for another workshop again as she had been so delightful.  They had talked about circles, read a story and then gone on a circle hunt through the galleries.  Artemis, thanks to our little art co-op, also pointed out the squares, triangles, and hearts she found and told the woman that hearts are organic shapes.  All four of us got to do the art project and we all headed home after a wonderful experience.  I’m only sad that we have to wait until January to attend another one.

Friday night we all piled into the car and headed downtown to stalk bats with about twenty of our closest friends.  We have a lesson on bats coming up and our field trip this month was an expedition to a bat bridge colony.  We heard a lecture from a volunteer naturalist, complete with pictures, where we got an earful from the kids about what they already know about bats.  The rest of the crowd was pretty enamored with them as they were very enthusiastic about the bats.  A little after sunset, the bats began to emerge from underneath the bridge.  As one of the children said, like a “tornado of bats” about 350,000 bats came streaming out from underneath the bridge and out into the night to devour at least two and a half tons of insects.  The kids thought it was great.  It was a fantastic and free way to spend a Friday night. 

The next morning we packed up once again and headed out to Texas A&M’s Chemistry Open House for a fun-filled day of all things chemical (and a touch of physics.)  The kids got new Periodic Tables, which are now hanging in their rooms, photo-reactive bead bracelets, stickers and balloons.  Plus the hit every station they could find, popping soap bubbles filled with carbon dioxide, playing with hydrophobic sand, painting with acids and bases, causing polymer based chemical reactions, getting photo-reactive manicures, collecting alloy pennies, testing themselves for radioactivity, checking out molecular modeling software, and watching nitrogen bombs explode in trashcans.  They were exhausted and happy by the time we got back home. 

Athena’s set a few goals for herself for this week including achieving her Book-It goal and digging back into history some more.  Hopefully, we’ll make those goals happen along with a few more things here and there.