How To Float A Cow With Balloons

This is a picture I drew for a class I help with at a little kid co-op.  This picture shows combining primary colors.  First you draw an animal, they were studying animals of Minnesota so I choose a cow, or what ever you want, a bus, a house a monster, a shark etc.  The three balloons are the primary colors, red, yellow and blue.  Where they overlap each other is where the color blending comes in .  The yellow and red make orange, the red and blue make purple and the blue and yellow would make green.

The kids liked it and they had a lot of fun drawing the animals.  Most of them choose pigs oddly enough.  There are all boys in the class so their drawing were let's just say...interesting.

Stephen Crane

For a CLEP book I have to read books by all these different authors. And the latest one I had to read a book on was Stephen Crane. The I book I read was (didn't finish reading :P) "The Red Badge of Courage." This was a very boring book, and I mean like clean out the barn instead of reading it kind of book! I read to chapter 11 and then the last chapter. I would not recommend this book, unless you like boring books about war and main characters who think to much how the war should be and what it isn't and how he's convinced their going to die. And boring stuff like that. But if you like that by all means don't let me stop you! Any ways I wrote a paper on Stephen Crane. I found it very hard to wright about his style of writing so here is the paper so if you may ever need to wright a paper on Stephen Crane, you might be able to remember this and maybe it will help. I always wright a little about the author at the end so that's why there is some information on him at the end of the paper.



Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane wrote about realism, naturalism, and
impressionism. Common themes in is
righting involve fear, spiritual crises and social isolation. Naturalism refers to the way that Crane felt
that humans didn’t have control over nature.
Stephen Crane was born on November 1st
1871. Crane was the eighth surviving
child of his parents. He started writing
at the age of four, and had some articles in published in papers by the age of
16. He left school in 1891 and started
working as a reporter and righter. His
first novel was “Maggie: A Girl of the
Streets.” Crane won international
acclaim for his 1895 Civil War novel “The Red Badge of Courage”, which he
wrote without having any battle
experience.
The focus of Crane’s writing is often centered around
man’s conflict with himself. For
example, in “The Red Badge of Courage”, the main character, Henry Flemming,
struggles with his ideals on what he thought war was going to be like and isn’t
and how he wants to be brave but isn’t.
He plays a lot of dialog in his head that doesn’t actually come to
fruition when the scene actually comes to pass.
Crane also tended to write from the unpopular point of
view. He writes instead about the lower
class and their struggles or the dark side of war instead of romanticizing the
events and eras in his books.
Another reoccurring theme in his writing is how man is
against nature and doesn’t have a lot of control over his destiny.
On June 5th, 1900 Crane died of tuberculosis in a Black Forest sanatorium (a health
spa) in Germany at the age of 28.

Balance

For science yesterday, I learned about balance.

You have hair in you ear that so that when you tilt your head the fluid pushes against the hairs and tells your brain which way you are leaning so you don't fall over. To show this we got a jar and put red water (so you could see it easily ) in it, if you tilt the jar the water stays horizontal. If you lean to one side the water stays the same but different hairs in your ear tell your brain that you are leaning. Lean forward or backward and the hairs tell your brain you are leaning. When kids spin around in a circle the fluid swirls around and around and the hairs have a hard time tell what direction you are leaning and send so many signals to your brain that you feel dizzy.

Only fill the jar about a quarter full.

Here we were standing on pillows with one food to see it it was easier to balance with your eyes open or closed. It was easier with our eyes open. Some of our balance comes from our eyes telling our brains what is happening.

Here we are seeing how long we can balance a peacock feather on our finger, and after that we did it with our eyes closed. We also used a wooden poll with a Kong wubba stuck on top. The peacock feather was easier to balance, mostly because it is lighter and didn't fall as fast so we had a longer time to right it.

YMCA

Thursday is homeschool YMCA day! We go to the Y from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., it is a six week session with a two week break in between. The first half of the two hours is either swim lessons, free swim, or you can stay in the gym and play what ever game we are going to play. The first quarter of game time they teach skills and other things for that game. The last quarter you play the game. We have played football and soccer so far. We play each game for three weeks and do two different games per session. We learn skills the first part and play the game last for two weeks in a row then you play the game the full hour the last week. The second hour, kids 10 and older can go upstairs and use the treadmill, elliptical, and other exercise equipment. If you stay downstairs you play games like Car Lot, Color tag, and a bunch of other fun games. It goes really fast and is really fun.

Como Zoo!

We went to the Como zoo last Friday. Here are some of the pictures we took.

This is a monkey from the ape house who sat against the window looking out. He must have been bored or tired because he started yawning!

This is Sparky. He was looking for a snack, he would zoom around and do a trick and then look at us.

A tapestry tells a thousand words

Yesterday for history we learned about Herold the Unfortunate, and saw a picture of the tapestry of the battle between him and William the conqueror. We only saw a little bit of it at a time because it is 20 inches tall 230 feet long! There are 35 parts and all of them are made by hand, they only have 8 different colors of thread in them!!! Here is a tapestry that I colored of Ride the Ducks, a tour we went on in Branson, MO. The first part is going in to the water, the second is driving on the lake, and the third is driving out of the water.