From Dragons to Finland

DRAGON ATTACK: We took some time today to tackle a fun art project, cartooning a dragon along with a Bruce Blitz tutorial via ActivityTV and our Comcast OnDemand.

It was a little more complicated than some of his tutorials we've followed before, but the kids are veterans now, and found their way.

Here's an in-progress shot from Bee. She'd already done her outlining, and was using her oil pastels to add color.

And here's an in-progress shot from CJ, as well as his final dragon! 

Super cute! Wait, no, I mean ferocious! 

SAY CHEESE: We finally got around to using a super neat-o Christmas gift - a mozzarella cheese making kit (thanks, Nonnie!)

There was math and science (measuring, temperature monitoring, etc.) involved in the process, which we loved, naturally.

They added an enzyme tablet to distilled water ....

 And farm fresh whole milk straight from a glass jar.

They heated it on the stove, carefully monitoring the temperature. Pretty soon something resembling a cross between a coral reef and brains began to form.

That cooked away for a few minutes, then it was time to strain it. 

That was followed by smooshing ...

  and stretching. It was a little ooey-gooey, but they got used to it.:)

In the end, they made a half dozen mozzarella cheese sticks (like you might buy in the grocery store). 

So how did it taste? Well, let's just say we're not putting Beecher's out of business anytime soon. We think we might have cooked or stretched it just a tad too long. And next time, we'd use more salt. But for a first attempt, it was fun and edible. 

ONE FOR THE BOOKS: CJ and Annabelle are big into the Guinness Book of World Records, so I let them know about an article I read today announcing that NASA's Landsat 5 recently landed a listing in the book as the longest-operating Earth observation satellite.

NASA: Artist's rendition of Landsat 5, credit USGS

Launched on Mar. 1, 1984, Landsat 5 was originally slated for a 3 year mission. Now, nearly 29 years later, it's still orbiting the globe, sending back images of the Earth from on high. It's circled our planet more than 150,000 times, capturing more than 2.5 million images of our Big Blue Marble. Things have not always been easy for the workhorse. Over the years, it has had battery and star tracking failures  lost onboard data recording capabilities. However, the crack technical team has always been able to find workarounds. 

On Feb. 11, we watched (via NASA TV), the live launch of the newest generation of Landsat satellites, the Landsat 7, from Vanderberg Air Force Base. 

FINLAND: In an effort to try to read down our stack of stockpiled "Time for Kids" mini magazines, today I had the kids read the issue all about Finland, from cover to cover.

Afterward, I asked them to write a report about Finland for me. Before they started, we reviewed what kind of information might be in a report (who, what, when, where stuff), the one a report is written in (rather than a review), and touched upon a couple of grammatical points.
Here's what CJ came up with.

The Republic of Finland is a place where more then 70% of its land is covered by forests. Also, it is mostly flat, where there are more then 50,000 lakes. It is also small.

During the 12^th century, Finland was a part of Sweden. King Erik of Sweden also introduced Christianity to Finnish settlers. During 1809, Czar Alexander I conquered The Republic of Finland, turning it into a self governing part of The Russian Empire. In 1919, Kaarlo Stahlberg became the first president of the Republic of Finland.

The Republic of Finland is west of the Russian Empire, where there is a border between them. To the north of Finland, there is Norway, where there is also a border. And to the west of Finland, there is Sweden.  

I thought his was a little short, but it's an OK report.

Here's Annabelle's report.

Finland is a snowy country with lush green forests that cover more 70% of it's land, and more than 50,000 lakes. The schools in Finland all serve free meals at lunchtime, and their language is called Finnish. Some of the words are olkka hyva (ol-kah hee-vah), which means please, kiitos (kee-tohs),which means thank you, hei (hay), which means hello, and nakemiin (nah-keh-meen), which means goodbye, and Finland in Finnish: Suomi. They make a snow castle each winter in Kemi, northern Finland. Their flag is white with a blue “plus” shape. The blue representing the lakes scattered across the land, and the white representing the snow. Their Coat of arms is a (king) lion with a sword like this. There are lots of  reindeer in Finland.
 Finland is in Europe, which is very close to the Arctic, which explains why it is so cold. Finland is in the Northern Hemisphere,
 Linus Torvalds is the Finnish software engineer famous for making the operating system Linux, And the stuents do very well on tests, though they have less homework. How do they do this? They arrange sticks and stones on the ground and tell their friends what geometrical shapes are where an how many there are.
 In the 12^th and 13^th centuries “Finland” referred to the area around Åbo, which later became Finland Proper, and other parts of Finland were called Tavastia and Karelia, but were also called Österland. In the 15^th century the whole land was commonly called Finland. This was only the beginning.

I loved her explanation of why Finnish students do so well. I think we should send American students out to the playgrounds with stick and stones!

Imagine my surprise this evening when we were leaving yoga and out of nowhere CJ pipes up with, "Hey, there's the flag of Finland!"

Sure enough, on a pole in the back parking lot of the Norse Hall, it waved along with other Scandinavian and the U.S. flag. So how 'bout that? They actually learned and retained something today!

FIRE AND RAIN: Our skies were gray and boring here in Seattle today. So what else is new? (In fact, the preeminent weather authority in the city has deemed this winter the most boring in Seattle's history!)

While there's nothing remarkable going on here, our sun is a source of endless eye candy, with its dynamic solar "weather."

Case in point: Right now there's a "monster" sunspot growing fast. NASA's keeping an eye on it, as solar storms and flares are possible. 

And check out this amazing footage from last July of fiery rain on Ol' Sol. In it, you'll see an eruption on the sun that has solar flres, a coronal mass ejection (CMEs) and then a dazzling display caused by changes in magnetic field lines, resulting in coronal rain.  

The video is a compilation of single frames, one taken every 12 seconds. The video shows 30 real time frames per second. The actual events shown above took place over nearly 10 hours on July 19, 2012. 

As pretty as CMEs are, they can be dangerous for we humans and our equipment. CMEs are the biggest explosions in the universe, and the X-rays and charged particles they produce reach Earth (or pilots or astronauts), bad things can happen, like power and radio outages, and radiation illness.

After watching the pretty video, the kids and I learned more about solar weather on a "SciJinks" page. (The site looks to be a cooperative effort of NASA and NOAA.)  And we took a "How Well Do you Know our Sun?" quiz on Space.com. We didn't score quite well enough to earn the  title 'solar scholars,' but we were told we're 'plenty bright.'