Pine cones, and Science Specialist goes YouTube

 There were so many demonstrations and artifacts to share last week, that we never got to the Question Box. I knew I owed the class some Question Box time, and you can bet they knew it too. We dove right into it without any preliminaries. The first question in the box was about pine cones. Actually it was a pine cone. In the box. Not a written question. An actual pine cone. I think our young cognitive scientists enjoyed the play on symbology::reality. They were off like a hurricane, asking about seeds and seed-eaters and sap and edible versus poisonous and geometry and developmental genetics. Dang if them kids didn't spend twenty minutes asking questions about a pine cone! Your average professor teaching a college seminar would count herself lucky indeed to find students so involved and thoughtful.
This week's demonstration involved baking soda and vinegar. Parental note: mixing baking soda and vinegar is a lot of fun, and may save you on one of those awful cabin-bound rainy days.
Now, those bubbles you get from baking soda and vinegar are carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide will suffocate a fire, which was demonstrated by use of a candle. Join the class by watching the demo here (hosted by YouTube).


Welcome to the classroom. And thank you for the privilege of spending time with your crop of affable young geniuses.

Pretty Exciting Week

This week's new specimens-for-the-microscope:
1. A snippet of cedar with the little pollen-releasing niblets on it, for the stereoscope
2. Some actual pollen grains shaken onto a slide, for the compound microscope

It's like Professor Eisner said - - the stereoscope is a more fascinating instrument. The bit of cedar has all sorts of shapes and crevices, and if you look closely you can see a few thousand teeny pollen bits just getting ready to fall. The pollen-on-a-slide, cranked up to 400x, just looks like a bunch of circles.


Last week's chromatography practice worked out well:

as you can see newspaper works better than computer printer paper. Still, both of them yielded some pretty good separation:






Important facts about chromatography
1. It's what they use in all those DNA tests you see in the news
2. It's a lot of fun at home



I got these great molecules on eBay, and they are now available in the classroom:





I took the liberty of doing a Molecular Models Focus Group at home before the class, and I learned:
1. Six-year-old fingers have enough strength to build with these,
2. Six-year-olds can totally grok what this set is about.

What became clear in class is:
3. These things have INCREDIBLE "touch me now" appeal.

As a demo I built a propane molecule and, wouldn't you know it, I just happened to have a BernzOmatic handy just in case somebody didn't know what propane is. The flame, of course, caused a wave of excitement; although the sparks from the traditional hand striker were perhaps even more popular. I hope everybody remembered the molecules part after all the uproar.


There was also a lot of fuss about the camera I brought, so I ended up taking a few group pictures. I don't want to post pictures of your kids on the web, so contact me privately for copies.
 
Thanks to the kids for bringing in all their questions and a scorpion and a magnificent huge conch shell and a really good chert (Texas Agate) sample. I totally missed the great synchronicity between the chert (AKA flint) and the striker above. Oops.

Thanks to the grownups for letting me spend time with their delightful-beyond-belief children.

(Meta: Change in blogging software)

It looks like Google bought Blogspot, so they have, ahem, upgraded the software that manages this site. I hope it still works.
They announce that it is "bursting with features", showing they haven't read any books about good design, and therefore still haven't caught on to the fact that people are sick and tired of features, and would prefer things that work and are intelligible. Is your VCR still blinking "12:00" ? Yeah. 

Chromatography and Sandpaper

We did an exercise in chromatography. I will try to bring you pictures next session.

I brought in some sandpaper samples for microscoping. Here is what they look like (60,120,400, and 1000 grit - - click the thumbnails for the actual photo).

I also brought in this fascinating discovery but got so caught up in everything else that I forgot to show it to the class. It'll be brought in on 17 January. You can see the way it will be in a tray introducing the vocabulary of observation and inference.