In Living Technicolor

COLORFUL: You'd be surprised how often the color wheel comes up in conversations around this place. However, until today, it's been all talk. I thought it would be good to walk the walk and make our own color wheels. So, I hopped online and found a couple of good references, including the one pictured (left).

We talked a bit about the triangles on the wheel - and how the primary colors form the corners of one triangle, while the secondary colors form the points of the upside down triangle. We also talked about how complementary colors are opposite one another on the color wheel.

Next, I had the kids round up a couple dozen crayons. We first picked out the primary colors and put them in a triangle. Next, we found crayons close to the secondary colors on the wheel. With those in place, we filled in the blanks according to specifications, sometimes scribbling on paper to see exactly what color they were when used (you can't just judge a color by its label!).

With the proper crayons picked out it was time to color our wheels. The kids cut out the inner circle of a paper plate and we divided it into halves, then quarters and then twelfths. Then it was time to color each slice of the pie, using the color wheels we'd found online as a guide.

What a worthwhile exercise - now the kids have a concrete visual of concepts we'd only talked about before.

UNDER A SPELL: We introduced a new list of words today, including the ridiculously spelled "school" and "very." They wrote their words a couple of times and then we did a verbal pretest, which went pretty darn well, with a couple of prompts from Mom.

OLD SCHOOL MATH: I actually busted out a workbook today for math time. We concentrated on ordinals and patterns. It was a second grade book, so I thought/hoped the sheets might be a bit of a challenge for the kids, but I was wrong.

I was pleased with how CJ completed part of one of his sheets. The question was: "These patterns have numbers that repeat. Can you figure out what comes next?" The first line was 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 __, which CJ finished with a 2 of course. The second line read 2 3 4 2 3 4 2 ____ and he wrote "3&4." I thought it was great that he actually finished the pattern (writing two numbers) instead of just writing the 3.

TINY BUBBLES: We were long overdue a science experiment here at MPA, so today we took on "Blobs in a Bottle" from the supercool Science BOB site that Christian found last week. The experiment is billed as "the world's easiest lava lamp." All we needed to make the magic was a plastic bottle, water, oil, food coloring and Alka Seltzer (I had to go buy the latter as, mercifully, it's not an MPA medicine chest staple).

We poured the water in a bottle and then I added the oil. I asked the kids what they thought would happen - if the two liquids would mix. CJ said, "Yo Gabba Gabba!" (a kids' show) says that oil and water don't mix." We came to find out "Yo Gabba Gabba!" was correct. ;) Next, we dropped in some color (pictured above, left) and then it was time for the magic. The kids added tablets of Alka Seltzer, a half at a time. Plop, plop, fizz, fizz and bubbles aplenty.

It was fun, but frankly the action was a tad bit less than what I was hoping for. ... Fortunately, when Christian got home, he quickly diagnosed the deficit - not enough oil. So we conducted a smaller-in-volume scale experiment, but the results wowed the kids - and us. The green globules were hopping, popping and boppin. Pretty cool!

DAFFY-DILS PART DEUX: On our run/ride Sunday we happened upon a couple of daffodils on public/Port property. Annabelle asked to pick 'em so we could repeat our flower-color-infusion experiment. I gave her the go ahead, and as soon as we got home, we trimmed their stems and stuck them into green water (for St. Patrick's Day). This go 'round, within minutes you could see tinges of green appear. By Monday morning, they were dramatically green laced - particularly the pale daffodil.
SEETHING: I was one photo upload and one click away from publishing this post. Over an hour ago. Right before my computer spontaneously rebooted AND, for whatever reason, that lightning strike ALSO reached through the Internet and wiped out the draft blog on Blogger. I'm blaming the leprechauns.