We had a roman soldier's meal over the weekend. The idea was to wrap up meat and veggies in foil and cook it over fire, Just Like The Roman Soldiers Did! J and I had a couple of conversations about whether or not Roman soldiers had access to tin foil and came up with some hypotheses about what they might have used instead, but decided to go with the flow. And look! No silverware! Roman Soldiers didn't have no stinkin' silverware! Everyone ate all of their food, which is an event in and of itself.


Last week we studied mountains and volcanoes for earth science, and so he had to do the volcano experiment, naturally. They all loved it of course (all three boys got lots of chances to errupt the volcano; we used a half gallon of vinegar and an entire box of baking soda, and they still wanted to keep doing it), and J and I talked about the difference between the chemical reaction of vinegar and baking soda versus the physics of a real volcano eruption. I think he got it:

WHAT WE DID

What We Used: We used baking soda, white vinegar, potting soil, water, a tray, a bottle, and red food coloring.

What We Did: First, we mixed the dirt and water. Then we mashed it into a kind of clay and put the bottle in the center, forming a mountain around it with the mud. Then we added vinegar to the bottle, and then put baking soda and red dye.

What Happened: The volcano erupted. The so-called lava was red. It spread to every part of the tray. Pretty soon it fizzled out so we added more vinegar or baking soda. Then it erupted again. We did it over and over again.

What We Learned: We learned that vinegar has acid in it and that it releases carbon dioxide when it has contact with baking soda. That’s called a chemical reaction. We also learned that lava comes out of a volcano because of pressure, not a chemical reaction. When lava is in the earth it is called magma.

We did some music study over the weekend and listened to an awful lot of Vivladi. Benjamen was more interested than Jonathan was, and he's been putting the CD back on the player every day this week.

Jonathan has committed The Wind and The Moon to memory, so now, for writing practice, he's copying out Let Dogs Delight to Bark and Bite by Isaac Watts. It's kind of an awful poem (we're only doing the first two stanzas, and I'm not fond of the moralizing even in just those two), but when we came across it in one of our books, J liked it well enough to ask to copy it out, so there we are. I'm finding that, the more we're learning together, the more I'm having to fight the urge to censor.