More videos?

As if I haven't shared enough videos lately, I have more.  Yep.  I haven't had my camera in my hand much at all lately, but I always (most days, if you ask Patrick) carry my phone with me.

Once a month, Madeline's dance studio has an observation day, when parents can come back and watch the children during their lesson.  I was unsure how Madeline would handle Caleb being in the same room, and my suspicions were confirmed.  While they practiced their routine for their recital, she kept pointing her finger at her brother.  It was hilarious.  Although I videotaped that, I won't be sharing it here just yet because I don't want to spoil the actual recital performance.

However, I did get another video of her during her warm up.

And not to leave out Caleb...

We had some fun this week with science.  In addition to reading great quality, "living books" like Thornton Burgess' Bird Book and his seashore book and James Herriot's Treasury for Children, we still continue to work our way through Dr. Nebel's Building Foundations Through Scientific Understanding.  I really love his socratic approach.  I love how all the scientific disciplines are studied concurrently, so children can see how they're related, rather than seeing concepts as isolated and disjointed.

Anyway, this week's lesson was a part of our ongoing study on the particulate nature of matter.  We learned about how the air in the atmosphere is a mixture of gases: nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.  We also learned that burning requires 1.fuel (in our case wax from a candle) and 2. oxygen.  Finally, we learned how carbon dioxide is a byproduct of burning, can put out a flame, and it's role in our own breathing and photosythesis.  Phew.

Anyway, before we talked about any of this, I mixed baking soda and vinegar together, resulting in a chemical reaction that produced carbon dioxide.  I then "poured" my jar of carbon dioxide over the candle, which consequently extinguished the flame.  Naturally Caleb was floored and not only wanted to see the demonstration done again, he wanted to create the mixture and "pour" the carbon dioxide on the candle himself.  I obliged.

(And yes, you did hear him say "carbon dioxygen".  How cute!)

Unfortunately with the rain we got on Friday, we couldn't do our weekly nature study.  So I was bummed about that.  A highlight one morning this week , for me at least (as the kids were still in bed) was seeing a male and female cardinal together!  I've never before seen a female cardinal.  So I was quite tickled.

Hopefully this week my camera will see some action, and I'll actually have photos to share.