Weekly Wrap UP 1/5/18 -- DNA extraction, Paul Cezanne and Alice in Wonderland tea party

The holidays are over and I hope you had a wonderful season with your families.  We had a great week and a half off.  Kids played with their new Christmas items and I worked in my glass studio and did a little lesson planning.  But I also did a bit of nothing as well.  I am relaxed and ready for the new year!

Coop doesn't begin for another week and Firedrake's public school didn't start till Wednesday this week so we are slowly getting back into a routine.  We should be back to full throttle by Monday, at least I hope.


I am somehow a bit behind on posting our school activities due to various things that have come up over the last few weeks.  So this post is a catch up on things we have done before the holidays, that I haven't had time to post about:)

MarioFan has completed his lab on extracting his own DNA, and DNA from banana and split peas:)

We have been working with this kit to help with our DNA exploration.  However  it must have been an old kit when I bought it as most of the chemicals inside had either evaporated or magically disappeared as it didn't work:(  So I had to search the web for other options

Years ago the kids extracted DNA from strawberries (MarioFan was about 6-7 then) so I wanted to find another fruit that would work.  I found instructions for bananas and split peas on the web so we did both:)

mashing up our peas using a blender

straining the liquid  -- we did the same procedure with the  bananas

We tried the book version of Cheek DNA but it didn't work :( hence why you will see three test tubes  in the following pictures

slowing adding alcohol

we had excellent results from the split peas!  The bananas took about ten minutes but we saw a few thousand DNA strands eventually.  We got nothing on the cheek cells (blue test tube)  

Before Christmas break we have been learning about the artist Paul Cezanne and working on a couple of art projects.

First project was from Meet the Master art program--ion this lesson the kids are really learning about foreground and background placement and a little of shading

their first project completed

Next we watched a few videos on shading and tried a still life arrangement of fruit:)  And learned about Shading using pastels but many of these techniques can be used with other mediums.

I found several videos on line to help illustrate blending techniques and we attempted to follow along with the video and complete our own.  This example is mine

so is this one

MarioFan's version of the above techniques.

Next the boys chose three different fruits and arranged them in a way that at least one fruit was front of  another.  

We encouraged the boys to use as many blending techniques as they wanted while working on their still life drawings.

I thought they turned out pretty good, considering neither boy likes getting their hands dirty or ART!!;)  They both prefer science and computers to art, but they really did try and that is what is important!

The boys have also finished up reading about Alice in Wonderland and before Christmas break we had a Tea Party and played a few Alice in Wonderland Games to wrap up our story.

I had this guide on my shelf and while we are not using it for the questions it did have some recipes in it that are mentioned in the book, so we thought we would make them and bring them in for our tea party at coop

MarioFan making black currant cake

Which turned out wonderfully

However the comfit recipe was a disaster, lol and then when I looked up what a comfit is this was not what I found.  It is more of a candied covered nut or berry.  IN the study guide book I used it was more like a cinnamon doughnut.  Ours were a bit well done as you can see.

At coop the boys were able to eat their treats and then we played some games .  The first is a free game I found on the web which is a Alice in wonderland shoots and ladder game.  We had the boys answer questions from the book before they were able to move their piece.

Next the boys worked together on building a card house.

Our friend had a harry Potter card house so the boys worked on that.  I  must say MarioFan got a bit frustrated with this project so his friend did the majority of the work while he read the directions.

Lastly the boys watched the (old) version of the movie.  They weren't to crazy this version, lol but it was the closest to the book we Mom could find.

Firedrake has completed her first semester of Public High School, where she is taking 2 classes.  She did well in both class earning an A in Psychology and in Algebra.  While Algebra will continue on for the rest of the year, we found out that her teacher will not be teaching this class next semester at the same hour as he did this past semester.  I found that really strange.  So Firedrake will be having a new Algebra teacher, which is stressing Firedrake out as she likes this one and is worried the next one won't be as good.  Since she struggles in Math this is a great concern of hers.  We are all keeping our fingers crossed as she goes into school next week.

Firedrake decided to take Science Fiction this semester.  Once again for the third hour she is in school she will be taking a study hall so she can access the Math Act lab if she needs it for additional Math help.  We were hoping she could get a third class but with her only attending at the end of the day we were not able to find a third class that interested her enough or that didn't conflict with her current choices.

Lastly since Firedrake earned A's in both her classes the school allows students to drop one final exam for the semester.  She chose to drop the psychology final much to our surprise.  Her confidence in Math has really grown this year.