Skip to main content

SOEST Field Trip

We went on another absolutely fabulous field trip last weekend.


We went with our homeschool group to the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology open house. Talk about your hands on experiments! This is a homeschoolers dream come true! There were probably a hundred displays and experiments for the kids to participate in. I'm only going to show a few of them here, but there were many, many more!

There was a maze to determine which microbe we each most closely resembled.
There were experiments with sea water.

There were 3-D displays of the surface of other planets.

There was even an area to try your hand at tossing a rope onto a target as if you were a scientist on a ship. This went really well..........


........until Emily accidentally threw the rope directly at me.



One of the coolest experiments took place outside. The scientist placed liquid nitrogen in a container and put it in a garbage can of water. The resulting explosion was quite a crowd pleaser and they repeated it every twenty minutes. We heard the boom all day long, no matter where we were!




My personal favorite was a much smaller event. This man was sitting at a table talking to kids about dry ice. He would put some dry ice in a plastic tube and crimp the tube shut at the top and submerge it in a cup of warm water. He talked to the kids the entire time about how the dry ice doesn't melt, it normally turns into vapor (which is why it's dry ice). He would tell them if they watched closely though, they could see it turn into a liquid when he put it in a tube under water. The kids would all move in close to see the dry ice start to liquefy and then BAM! The dry ice would cause a mini-explosion and the water in the cup would shoot straight up and hit the ceiling. The kids jumped sky high and the man would laugh and laugh. Sometimes he would have to wipe his eyes he would laugh so hard.


I enjoyed this one so much, I stayed around to watch it four times.


There is nothing like watching a group of kids get monumentally startled for a good belly laugh.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mammogram

I'm having my annual mammogram today. I always hear about how painful they are, but honestly, I've never thought they are that bad. Not the most comfortable, but not painful either. Every time I have a mammogram, I'm reminded of this story. It won the Erma Bombeck Writing Competition and I still get a kick out of it every time I read it. So I'm posting it here today for your reading pleasure: Erma Bombeck Writing Competition 1st place in Humor Category Winner Leigh Anne Jasheway of Eugene, Oregon "The First Time's Always the Worst" The first mammogram is the worst. Especially when the machine catches on fire. That's what happened to me. The technician, Gail, positioned me exactly as she wanted me (think a really complicated game of Twister - right hand on the blue, left shoulder on the yellow, right breast as far away as humanly possible from the rest of your body). Then she clamped the machine down so tight, I think my breast actually turned inside o...
2 comments
Read more

Queen Emma's Summer Palace

We recently visited Queen Emma's Summer Palace in Honolulu. If you are expecting a "palace", you will be disappointed. It's a nice house but not particularly palatial . If you think of it as Queen Emma's Summer Cottage, you'll enjoy it more because it will meet your expectations. Queen Emma was the wife of King Kamehameha IV. Their only child, Prince Albert, died at age four, and King Kamehameha IV died a year later. It's a sad story. The home was used by the royal family in the mid-1800's. Today it holds artifacts from that time period. Some of the furnishings and memorabilia actually belonged to Queen Emma. Unfortunately, no photography is allowed inside, so I didn't take any pictures. I did, however, find some images on the internet which I am copying here. Don't sue me, please. I did try to buy postcards in the gift shop, but they didn't have any. This photo is of the parlor. Queen Emma acquired this baby grand piano later ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cookie Map of Egypt

Katie is studying ancient Egyptian history right now and in the interest of making it more "hands-on" for her, we've joined a co-op at our church. We've been part of the co-op for a long time, but we've not done history with them until now. I was in charge of this week's craft project so I had all the kids make maps of ancient Egypt out of cookie dough. Katie and I made one at home for practice, then we made one again at co-op so the pictures look different as I used some photographs from each session. Each child started out with one full tube of sugar cookie dough. They pressed each one out into a 10x6 inch rectangle as if it were clay or play dough. We used toothpicks to outline where we wanted land formations to be. Then we outlined the Mediterranean Sea with a blue gel. And filled it in with blue icing. We used Twizzlers to outline the Red Sea. Although the Red Sea isn't actually red, there is a seasonal algae there which is red in color. I thought the...
4 comments
Read more