Making Play Dough...Sort of.

I have made play dough a lot and have always used the same recipe. It involves heating the flour, salt, water, oil & creme of tartar mixture over the stove top. I didn't have creme of tartar this time so we made a 'no cook' recipe that i found. It was fun. Lola measured out all the ingredients herself & the girls did all the mixing themselves.
The end result was so much like a bread dough, that I thought it would be fun to bake them just to get them really hard & let the girls paint their creations.

Static Electricity

Today we talked about static electricity. We tried an experiment that we had read about once & then expanded upon it.
We sprinkled some salt & pepper on a piece of paper, then rubbed a plastic spoon on a wool sock. Lola held the spoon about a 1/2 inch from the salt & pepper sprinklings and watched the pepper jump onto the spoon while the salt did nothing.
While the wool rub gave the spoon a negative charge, the salt & pepper were both positive, but only the pepper was light enough to be attracted to the spoon.
Lola was quick to answer (correctly!) why just the pepper jumped & not the salt. Lola's uncle, who was visiting at the time, observed our project and wondered out loud why the directions for the experiment would call for a plastic spoon. He thought metal would be a better conductor so we tried the metal spoon too. Nothing happened. I didn't really know what to say!
Then we had some fun and tried rubbing the spoons on the sock & putting them near our hair to get our hair standing on end. It didn't really work, so we rubbed balloons on our head instead!

A Puppet Show in the Making

Lola's school handles the core subjects of Math and Language Arts, I like to encourage these subjects here at home too.
Today, Lola and I played a writing game (an idea I got from a book!). It's called the "Silent" game...I passed a note to Lola that said I wanted to play a game with her but the rule was "NO TALKING!". We exchanged the note back and forth, responding to each other. Through the course of the dialogue, we got the idea to make puppets so we abandoned our note soon after to get to work. We have done the game several times since then, though. Lola's face lights up every time I surprise her with a written note!

Here are the puppets we made. Later on, we made a story for them.

Dia del los Muertos, part dos

No Dia de los Muertos experience would be complete without Pan de Muerto! It's a sweet bread, flavored with anise and decorated with "bones" made from the dough and colored sugar on top!

Dia de los Muertos!

Today, I took Lola to a historical park where decorated alters were all around for Dia de los Muertos. Lola has such a healthy attitude towards celebrating a loved ones life, I feel sometimes like I have so much to learn from her, as opposed to her learning from me!
She is also part Mexican herself and I love sharing these aspects of the culture with her.

Field Trip!

Yay for pumpkin patches! I love this time of year! Both my kids were born in the fall & I have always been a huge fan of this particular season....the autumn colors, Halloween, celebrating their birthdays, etc., etc...
One of our favorite activities is visiting the pumpkin patch. I don't know why this is so fun, except that is encompasses all our favorite things about this time of year into one area. Our favorite pumpkin patch has a a huge cottonseed hill that the kids can slide down on little sleds that are provided there. There are hayrides, petting zoos, playgrounds, mazes, etc., but the kids spend most of their time on the cottonseed hill.

Art

We started a project today with another homeschooling family. But shhhhhh! We didn't finish yet & it's going to take several get togethers before we can present the final product, so....more on this later.