Where's George?

http://www.wheresgeorge.com/

Sam: Where's George is a website that you go to and type in the code on your dollar, and then you click "submit" and see where your dollar has been.

C: You stamp a bill with a stamp and its got clear rubber pad stuck to a sticky thing, and the ink is red and it says "see where I've been, track where I go next www.wheresgeorge.com".

Sam: We found about it when Tory's dollar had it stamped on it. We typed it into wheres george.com and found out that we were the first to receive it. It was from Pacifica.

C: On Wheres George dot com, there was a story about this weird guy who really liked doing where's george, and he would stamp like crazy and he stamped almost three quarters of a million dollars.

Bike Ride Aftermath

Dad: We did our bike ride aftermath project before math (and before geography too). We printed out the map of the bike trails we rode on, and the kids traced the path that we rode on. We brainstormed on all the things we saw or stopped and did along the way, and the kids each picked out three to write about.

Sam: We saw a cement mixer pouring cement on the sidewalk. The cement was too dry, and the guys could not get the cement out. Then we went past a tree trimmer. Because it was too big for the trail , we had to get off the bikes. Then when we got on the Iron Horse trail, we saw a waterfall with a heron and two snowy egrets.

C: Tiger was a cat who loved the front tire of Dad's bike. Lunch at Trader Joe's consisted of a ham sandwich lunch kit. The water fall was a huge concrete wall that water poured over, and there were two egrets and a heron.

Dad: We spent some time on the Internet looking at the CalFire incident report website and some incredible satellite photos of the fires on a NASA website. The photos give a really good perspective of how large the fires are and how extreme the winds are. Check out: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ Click on the "Natural Hazards" link and then click on the flame icon over California on the map that comes up. The most current of the photos will show first, but there are links to previous photos, so you can see how the fires have evolved over the past week. It looks like there is lots of other interesting material on the website also.

Finally, we tried watching the first episode of an older BBC series titles "Civilisation" that I checked out of the library. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. This was too dry for the kids and seriously out of date. It would be an awesome example for high school or college kids of a rigidly eurocentric point of view.

Contra Costa Bike Trails

Dad: While riding bikes on the Contra Costa Canal Trail, my son tells me: "I don't ever understand that Nonsequitur comic." In the homeschool business this is what they call a "teachable moment". He had read the comics in the car a couple of hours earlier. I'm always glad to know the wheels are turning in there even if I don't often know what's being processed. Now he knows what nonsequitur means, and I hope he is comforted in knowing that nobody else understands the comic either.

We had lunch at Trader Joe's and Starbucks in Concord and discussed our Eureka moments for the day.

Sam: My Eureka moment is that when you're riding your bike you can feel the wind on your face, but if you turn your face sideways, you can't.

We pondered that maybe your face is most sensitive or that maybe the sound in your ears lends to the feeling.

Dad: When you look forward, you feel the wind on your face--when you turn your face sideways, you feel a tree crashing into you.

C: My Eureka moment is Dad's joke.

Mom: My son says he never wants to live in a city. There's not enough space, and you can't just let your dog out to go for a walk by itself.

Our Llangollen Narrowboat Trip

Bilbo's and Frodo's Journies- By C

Bilbo and Frodo were alike and different in many ways. First, the both of them had been started off by Gandalf. Secondly, both of them had help from elves. However, Frodo's journey was to destroy the ring, wheras Bilbo's journey was to collect treasure. Last but not least, Bilbo was helped by Beorn and Frodo was helped by Barleyman Butterbur, Tom Bombadil, the Lady Goldberry and Aragorn a.k.a. Strider. The journies of Bilbo and Frodo were similar in many ways.

Magnetic Field of a Bar Magnet

Magnetic Field of a Bar Magnet, By Sam

Apparatus:
Aluminum cooking pan
2 bar magnets
Canon Camera
Scotch Tape
Paper
Steel Brads
Electric Toothbrush
Filings

Instructions:
Tape 1 bar magnet to pan
Put 1 brad in pan
Turn brad to WE, it won't work, it turns to NS
Then put a handful of brads on pan
Take electric toothbrush
Turn electric toothbrush on
Place electric toothbrush hard on pan
Keep pushing and see what happens

Observations
What happened with the brads is they take shape of the magnetic force and make an awesome pattern. What happened with the filings is they do the same thing but they are smaller and don't get clumped up as much. Why it happens is the magnetic force pulls the iron onto itself and they stay

Observations from C:
Brads make circular patterns in pan when vibrated.
Iron filings will make cross section of a magnetic field.

Mom's Eureka Moments

Since we've gotten back from our trip, I've been spending a lot of time sorting photos. Over 4,000 of them! Still working on that project, and I'll be posting some small slideshows from different parts of the trip.

We've all been settling into a steady school routine, a little more conservative and traditional than we've been. I think we are all feeling the need to get back in a routine and maybe play a little "catch-up?". The kids have been working out of several textbooks, and have been attending workshops.

"The Dad" and I were both talking yesterday about what a good attitude "the boy" has had lately about school, music, cleaning his room, everything. Its been neat to see him get focused, and take pride in his accomplishments. It feeds on itself. Watching that unfold has been a Eureka Moment for me this week.

I haven't been pushing too many special projects this week (except the croissant project, which turned out well, but we all--even the kids--were feeling a bit sick from eating too much, and that was only two each!) It has been wonderful to see the kids generate their own special projects. "Sam" read her social studies chapter this morning, about the California Indians, and went outside to find acorns. She wants to make acorn mush for herself. C found a rusty bolt in the fire pile and wanted to rehabilitate it. He looked it up on the internet, and asked if he could have some oxalic acid. . . that was re-directed (who has that around the house, anyway?) and now they are disolving a nail in muriatic acid (from the pool).

When they ask us something we don't know the answer to, we tell them to look it up. We used to get a lot of "aw mom!", but lately they seem to just go to the computer and look it up! Very exciting!

Croissant Fun Part 1

Sam: We started to make croissants, but they take 3 days, and I'm really craving croissants right now.

C: We used milk, and yeast, and flour, and sugar, and salt, and butter.

Sam: Mainly, you just put all the ingredients in a bowl, then you knead it, then you put it in the fridge for 5 hours, to get the dough cold.

C: Because it would relax the gluten.

Sam: The slide show explains the steps we did to make it.

C: The slides at the end with mini-people show kneading, but not with real people. We made the table and the dough and put the clothes and shoes on. And the boys-- we cut their hair to make them not girls anymore.

Sam: We are going to post some more later.

C: We are using the Village Bakers Wife, the Gayle's recipe.

Yoplait

Sam: Mom made homemade yogurt. How you do it is you boil milk, then you take some vanilla bean, some sugar, put both of those in, then you put it on a heating pad, and put the heating pad at 100 degrees. Also you put two teaspoons of store bought yogurt, so that it puts some good bacteria in, and makes it taste like yogurt. The bacteria eats the lactose (milk sugar) and makes the milk into yogurt.

I like homemade yogurt more than store bought yogurt because it tastes sweeter.

Food

Money, Money, Money

C: They had "pound" (£) coins that were as big as quarters, but really thick and they were gold colored and worth two dollars. The smallest paper notes in the UK were £5 notes. The coins worth the most were the £2 coins, and the notes worth the least were the £5 notes.

Mom bought me a pair of new shoes, that cost £20, but they were really $40.

An exchange rate is how much American money exchanges for foreign currency. The exchange for UK money is $2 to £1. And for $1.50 you get a Euro.

Sam: You should try to spend all of your money, because if you don't spend it, there isn't really much you can do with it. When we went back to England from France, I exchanged 5 Euros (€) to my Mom, for £3.50.

The money looked very different, because it was fatter, and made out of two different kinds of metal sometimes.

This is the Pound symbol: £
This is the Euro symbol: €
This is the Dollar symbol: $

Comments

Just a note to say that we've disabled the comments section, and added an email link to us at the bottom of the page.

For one thing, it turns out that I'd mistakenly put the wrong email address for comment verification, which explains why many were not getting through. (It doesn't explain why some of them were, however).

An additional reason, is that comments sections are really intended to generate a discussion among viewers, which isn't relevant here.

We are back at home, recovering, and will be posting a few more follow-up postings about the trip, as we decompress.

Stonehenge and Avebury

C: I didn't really like Stonehenge that much, because we didn't get to go in, and Dad wouldn't let me climb up on the fence so I could see it.

Dad: Climbing on the fence didn't make it any easier to see Stonehenge.

C: Avebury was actually kind of cool, because it had this really shiny white and light green path made out of limestone (the pale green was from sheep poop). We ran around and played Robin Hood. The rocks were not that interesting because we weren't allowed to climb on, and anyway, they were impossible to climb on. They were too steep.

Sam: At Avebury there were big hunks of sheep poop on the ground, and it stinks like crazy. I really don't know how they got the stones there.

C: Well, the prehistoric people tied vines to the big rocks, and dragged them, which made the big ditches.

Mom: Is that your theory?

C: Yup. That's my hypothesis.

Mom: Is it testable?

C: No, not really. We don't have the really long-ago guys. But that's just my hypothesis, so if you don't believe it, you don't have to.

Mom: Did you want to say anything about coming through customs?

C: And when we came back into the US, they had to wash our shoes because it might have hoof and mouth disease, or something else.

Mom: One of the questions on the customs form was "Have you recently been through sheep or cow pasture?". Our answer was "yes" and when the customs agent saw all of the sheep poop still on our shoes, he said we were entitled to a free shoe cleaning! It took about 30 minutes for the Homeland Security officers to hand-scrub all of our shoes.

(Oh, and you might wonder why we deprived our children of the experience of going inside to see Stonehenge. The reason is this: We could see it perfectly well from the road for free. If you paid the $12 each to get in, you got to walk on the boardwalk around it, not much closer that from the fence, and it was very crowded with tourists and tourbuses. We thought we'd get just as much out of seeing from the road, and the kids would enjoy Avebury better because they could run around inside, and touch the stones. We, the adults, did wonder why, with the publicity surrounding the hoof and mouth outbreak, a world heritage site is sending worldwide visitors home with sheep poop souveirs. We are researching this for a future entry (and home-school topic, of course!)

What is the Magna Carta?

C: We went to the Salisbury Cathedral and saw a copy of the Magna Carta. The Magna Carta is an old piece of cow hide that has a bunch of latin writing on it, that says that the king needed to give the noble people some rights. Its about 800 years old. Its important because it is still in use today, and its really old. It was the first agreement to make a significant change in the way the aristocracy was treated. It said people had certain rights. It said the king couldn't take away their land, and couldn't tax them as heavily. It also said that if someone broke the law they would get a trial. It only applies to those landowners.