2021-22 Homeschooling Projects

A few weeks back, our family tracked our eating for a week as part of a health segment. It was pretty easy and didn't really change my schedule much. I forgot a day somewhere in the report but my mother helped me fill in the gaps. I was surprised to find that one of my favorite drinks, chocolate milk, was much healthier than I thought because milk has a lot of protein. Another thing that logging showed me was that I could improve my eating by increasing my vegetable and protein consumption. I could accomplish this by eating more veggies every meal, more fruit and more protein-rich foods.

       Last week I had to log my food consumption for health. It was hard to remember what I had each day, but I logged multiple times a day, and if I couldn't do that my mom helped me remember. The most surprising thing was the chicken caprese sandwich having the most calories and protein because I haven't ever see the nutrition value of the ingredients. The thing I did best was not eating too much junk food. One way I would improve my snacking is not eating as much calorie dense snacks in a sitting.

  For science we made four different solar ovens -- two reflective bowls and two pizza box solar ovens. The two variations of the reflective bowls were a metal bowl, and a plastic bowl with tinfoil lining the inside. The box ovens weren't very different from each other. When we set them up at 11:30 the temperature was 34°F outside. At 12:10 the marshmallow in the dominoes box was 49°, the metal bowl was 45°, the plastic bowl was 40°, and the brown box was 75°. At 1:00 the dominoes box was 47° and its paper was 60°, the metal bowl's marshmallow was 37° and the tinfoil was -5°, the plastic bowl's marshmallow was 33° and the bowl was -11°, and the marshmallow in the brown box was 56° and its paper was a whopping 80°. If we did this in summer this would work better because in winter we don't get as much sunlight, and the air is too cold for the insulation in the pizza boxes to work meaningfully, so for the heat doesn't build up enough to heat the marshmallows. The air c...

We had a tinker crate sent to us by Kiwico from our subscription that had us set up a LED light. There was a bonus activity of hooking up some wires to the LEDs, letting us touch the wires to materials and see if the materials are conductive (more on that later). Materials that made the LEDs work (and therefore were conductive) were tap water, graphite, metals, and coins. Things that were not conductive are wood, paper, plastic, filtered water, human skin, hair, glass, and baking soda. The things that light up the LEDs are conductive, meaning it lets positively and negatively charged electrons flow through easily.

I was tasked with writing a poem that is similar to the styles of Beowulf or Emily Dickinson so I wrote a poem using the style of "Because I could not stop for Death". I had writer's block so I forced the problem into a poem. So I could not write a Poem- Stanzas in a 3- My Brain’s so hekin horrible And all it says is E.-- I try to get it into place- It tries to decline- It doesn’t want to write a poem So all it does is whine.-- It has managed to write a poem- It hated it through and through- And I just kept telling it That’s all it had to do.--

  We had an assignment about making poems in the style of Beowulf or Emily Dickinson, and I wrote a Emily Dickinson poem, using her poem "I Have Never Seen Volcanoes" as a template. I have never seen “Potatoes” But, when Farmers tell-- How that old bland ground becomes much blander-- Usually so tasteful-- Bear within in appealing Ordnance Fried, mashed and stuffed -- Being Eaten for breakfast And appealing men-- If the stillness is Draining In the human face-- When apon a hunger Titanic-- Potatoes carve their place.

The idea behind our first conservation of mass experiment was if we boil water until it was steam it would weigh the same because it was just changing form, not gaining or losing any mass. We put an eighth of a cup of water in the jar before, and  after boiling, a teaspoon turned to steam. The jar with water was  282g before boiling, 281g after some is converted to steam (a little might have escaped the lid), and 280g after opening the lid to let steam escape. This went just as I expected because I knew conservation of mass is a fundamental law of physics. We also conducted another experiment using ice to test conservation of mass over a phase change from solid to liquid. We put three ice cubes in a jar, weighed it, and then let it sit for a few hours. The ice cubes weighed 12 3/8 ounces. When the water melted, we weighed it again and its weight was the same. This was proof that the theory of conservation of mass is true.