For the month of August the kids and I have been working on completing our Weather unit. We have watch a few videos, read many books, completed a lap book and done several fun experiments. Today I will just post 2 of the things we have accomplished as we wrap up this unit and move on to the Human body. The spine of our lessons have come from this book, although many experiments have come from other resources.
I found a weather vane kit and the kids spent the morning assembling it and then we spent a couple of weeks monitor the weather on our own.
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| We have it on our back deck and the kids like to check out the temperature. It has been very hot in our area recently |
Next I pulled out a a solar oven and solar water heater kit that I purchased ages ago and we gave it a try with some amazing results
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| Kids assembling the kits |
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| We decided to try to cook a hard boiled egg in our oven. We chose a particularly hot day in order to get the best result we hoped. It was 96 degrees on the day we gave it a try |
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| We wrapped up our egg in black construction paper and placed it in a plastic bag and inserted it into the oven. |
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Next we placed the oven on the back deck where we get the most sun for the longest section of the day .
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The oven was outside from 10 am until 4 pm. We kept moving the oven to catch the most direct sun throughout the day
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| We also constructed a solar water heater, but the results for this weren't nearly as impressive as the solar oven |
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| The temp for this day reached 96 degrees and we left the solar oven and water heater outside for 6 hours |
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| When we started to peel the egg we were very excited that it had cooked |
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| We were all curious to see if the yolk had cooked as well |
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| And it had!!! So cool!! although the box warned us not to eat the cooked egg as the oven is very uneven and could result in a problem. So we just admired our egg and then threw it away. The kids were so excited with their results they called their dad to tell him on his way home from work. |
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| Next we removed the water from the bottle and recorded the temp and it reached 102 degrees! According to the directions it should have reached over 104...we might try this one again as their was some water leakage and I didn't have the best thermometer to measure the temperature. |
This wraps up our weather unit and in the next week or two will begin our Human body unit:)
It's cool that the egg actually cooked! I've heard good things about the Prentice Hall Science Explorer series, but haven't used them yet. I wanted to use them with my son and forget why I didn't. I hadn't heard of them when my other kids were young, but hopefully will use them with Sola. That is an impressive looking weather station! Ours have always been super small.
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