Eyes on the Skies

WINDOW ON THE WORLD: We worked on some science stuff right out of the gate this morning. One of their assignments involved cutting out a picture frame, mounting it on a window and then classifying the types of clouds you see through it.

Today was a cloud bonanza. In the frame above, you see a cumulus cloud, but the sky also offered up cirrus and stratus clouds today. A nice variety.

The kids also did worksheets on reading a thermometer. I appreciated that they were on the Celsius scale, as we should have converted to that a loooooong time ago.

GROWING LIKE GANGBUSTERS: We checked on our Root-Vue today and wowie! They're growing like crazy. CJ and Annabelle will be crunching on carrots soon.

STICKY SITUATION: We continued to put together the kids' "Fun with Photoshop" display. Today's task: mounting each of the enlargements on a like sized piece of foam board - so they have a bit of 'pop' on the display.

Teaching the kids how to mount a photo using spray adhesive was tons of fun, let me tell you. Mercifully, we managed to get it done without completely ruining any of them.

WAITING ROOM: While CJ was in acting class, Annabelle and I had some fun and games. First, we played Yahtzee using a Super Mario themed set. I've never been much of a fan of that game - too much luck, not enough skill involved, IMHO. But it held Annabelle's interest - until some mental math on her part made her realize she wasn't going to win, and then she wanted to quit. About that time a boy from a school in the building came by with a teacher, who was trying to track down the kid's late parent via cell phone. So, the forgotten boy (a cute kid about CJ's age) happily played with Annabelle and our Yahtzee set. He'd never heard of the game before, so I explained some of the rules to him, but mostly he was drawn in by the Mario theme. I'm pretty sure the teacher was happy to have us help entertain the kid while the wayward parent was tracked down. A few minutes later, the dad arrived.

After Yahtzee, we played a game using our Scrabble SLAM! deck of cards. I have no idea what the official rules are - we just each held 7 cards in our hand at a time and took turns making four letter words, having to work with the word that was on the board.

While we were playing a teenaged girl came over and politely interrupted to ask the name of the game we were playing, saying,. "My mom homeschools my 7-year old sister, and I think she'd really like it," the young woman explained. I had to smile and share that we were doing some homeschooling that very minute. I gave her the game name and told her we'd made up our own rules, but that I thought it was still good spelling practice.

MATHS: CeeJ and Bee were introduced to a new challenge today - multiplying double digit numbers. Their eyes just about popped out of their heads initially. I quickly reassured them they could handle this. After all, these problems were just a single digit number times some multiple of 10, 100, or 1,000. I quickly demonstrated just how easy these types of problems are to solve and they got them all right.

Later in the day, we played around with a new math-focused Web site I discovered via a Tweet: Raytheon's Math Moves U.  According to the site's about us section, "Raytheon believes that tomorrow's engineers and technologists need to be excited by and interested in math today." The site is aimed at middle school students, but CJ and Annabelle, who are considerably younger, found it plenty engaging.

They each created profiles on the site, and explored the games section. They had to do some math that, intially, appeared well above their level, but I was able to show them that by breaking it down, it really was stuff they could handle. For instance, one problem involved the info that 720 sheep can be sheared in 9 hours, and they were supposed to provide a ratio in its simplest form expressing that fact. I showed them how to dial it down, first dividing 9 and 720 by 3, and then by further dividing them by 3 again, and they understood that the ratio is 80 sheep in 1 hour.

HATS OFF TO HAM: We can't let the day go by without mentioning super Astrochimp Ham. Today marks the anniversary of his successful spaceflight, in 1961. For his flight in a Mercury capsule atop a Redstone 2, Ham was secured in biopack couch.

His flight was suborbital, and his vital signs and tasks (yes, he had a 'to do' list) were constantly monitored. Ham had a harrowing experience, as his capsule partially lost pressure, but the spacesuit he was wearing saved his skin. 

Ham's heroic flight lasted 16 minutes and 39 seconds. You can read more about it here:

Ham, Space Chimp