Epic Foam Explosion

Today's DIY Project - Create a Foam Explosion

Elephant Toothpaste Foam Explosion

We're doing the "Elephant Toothpaste"(kid friendly version) as demonstrated by Steve Spangler Science.

Ingredients:

• 4 oz Hydrogen Peroxide
• splash of dish soap
• desired food color (optional)
• Yeast solution (dry yeast + water)

In a disposable bottle we measured 4 oz of peroxide.  Chase then  mixed in the dish soap and food color before adding in the catalyst.  We used yeast for a kid friendly version.  Chase also wore safety glasses and this was done on our junk picnic table (it needs to be fixed).  Then, explosion!  Much more impressive than the old baking soda and vinegar volcano!  :D  This foamed up real fast and kept erupting.  He was quite impressed.

The project page has member projects and how to's for you to learn how.  Chase is posting up the video of his project now, which may take a while for it to load on DIY.org.  But here it is below:

HP Instant Ink

We've started up with HP Instant Ink to try to save money on our printing costs.  We have an HP Instant Ink compatible Printer, HP OfficeJet 3830 Series (affiliate link).  HP's program will save a lot of money on ink, since it charges per printed page, rather than amount/color of inks used.  And you get rollover pages, up to your plan amount.  We're starting off with the 300 page plan, which is normally $9.99, but we have a promo giving us a free month.  If you want a free month, you can sign up with our link - Instant Ink.  It grants us one month free and new enrollments also get the free month.  

It will send the ink before we run out, there are 3 different plans to fit your budget and you can change them any time.  $9.99 being the highest with 300 pages.  I probably won't be printing anywhere near that much, but I wanted to start with the higher plan while I have it for free.  Also, buying ink costs more than $10.  I'll write up a proper review after I've received it.  I plan to use my printer for both homeschool and professional art projects, like printing out my digital stamps and papers.  So, hopefully, I'll get some good use out of it.  The HP Connected website gives you a comprehensive record of your usage, so you can see how much you're using and adjust your plan accordingly.

First Weeks in Review + Dungeon Crawl!

PBS Learning Media Storyboard for new school year

Friday and gave Chase a test and storyboard assignment this morning to review what we've learned so far.  I made my own storyboard to highlight a few of the things.  Just a good way to keep track of what we've learned.  Don't see anyway to embed these.  It is similar to the Glogster posters, though those you can embed.  However, Glogs take a long time to load, I think it is all flash or something.  This could also be used as a presentation for projects.  Though Windows 10 has a built in app that might work better.  It's called Sway.  I'll have to play around with it a bit to see how useful it would be.  The storyboards are simple, and that can be good enough.

In the afternoon, we did our first dungeon crawl.  Only made it to the first room of the Old Aqueducts, though.  We had a random encounter with 4 tiny scorpions and they kicked our butts because we couldn't hit them!  Hahaha.  Well, after Kai (Chase's fighter) fell into a floor trap that nearly killed him, we took on a huuuuge centipede and destroyed it.  Then there was lewts.  Emberlyn (my pirate/rogue) found some gold and split it (evenly, of course! ---- not!) and Kai found a glowing gem and a cool sword.  Our NPC, Asila, a second year Healer student, found a small silver ring.

That is as far as we got, had to have them take a short rest...  Guess we're combining 3.5 and 5 rules to try to simplify things.  Rather than make us spend the night in the dungeon when it should really take one night only.  We're exploring a tunnel under our school and they would probably have to send a search party after us if us first years didn't make it back.  But hey, we did sign the waivers that adventurer's school could mean our deaths!

Chase has no problem solving math problems on the fly as he rolls his saves and attacks.  He did well with the roleplay part, with a character afraid of bugs and our first encounters....  My character flaw has a fear of ghosts.  Kevin wanted us each to have a flaw to make our characters more interesting and have fun to roleplay with.

For our table, we bought a shower curtain as it is cheaper than a large vinyl mat, cut it to size and we're using overhead markers to write on it.  He made a dungeon map to go under it and drew on all the features and added tokens as encounters.

The DM notes and encounter tokens!

New miniatures for our characters from Reaper Mini.

The full table view of the dungeon.

Oops, just remembered, forgot to do school pictures today.  Well, maybe we'll take them on Monday.  We were still discussing what to do with them.  Last year it was Minecraft themed, where I used a green screen to superimpose him into a Minecraft scene he composed.  I think he wants to do that again, but after looking at the portrait of Benjamin Franklin with his favorite things to present himself as a person who believed in the Age of Enlightenment, he might want a tailored portrait.  Maybe styled as a painting.  Only my Wacom isn't compatible with Windows 10, plus I managed to lose my stylus!

Last year's pictures!  2015-2016 School Year - 3rd Grade

Five Day Lunch Plan!

I saw a brilliant idea to take the argument out of lunch.  Every day it is, "What do you want for lunch?" "What do we have?"  *list every item in the house* "I don't want that!"...  It gets so frustrating to make him pick a lunch and eat it too.  So, the solution?  Let's see if this works.  This is our first trial of it.

If I can find the link again, I'll share the original idea. (cannot find original blog, searched my history all the way to the 9th and it is just too much)  But it's pretty simple.  Chase will have a grocery budget, which he will plan his meals for school days for breakfast and lunches.  It must meet all the food group requirements and be within his week's budget.

He has made his list, and I must say, I'm pretty impressed by it.  He even has a dessert for the week, a pre-made cake!  lols!

We're a bit behind schedule for school today.  He took to long getting ready so lost his computer privileges for after school.  So, that sets his tone for the day.  Wah wah wah...  :B  Well, he cooperated writing his list after a bit of prodding.  Then, took too long with his busy work.  Now, he's taking an eon to have his lunch...  Sigh.

The afternoon plan was to do his RPG Maker VX Ace tutorial for the school project.  But it looks like we may not have time for it.  It was going to be some computer time for him as part of school.  Maybe tomorrow will see better behavior.  We have no time to dilly dally.  I have an ultrasound around 11 and he has to be all the ball for getting ready.  And Kevin wants to do gym class with him afterwards.  I suggested at the park.  We'll see how that goes.

*Update*  Ultrasound in the AM went very well.

Chase had just a half day's lessons, Gym class and daily worksheets.  He had reading time while he waited with Kevin at the Doctor's office.

But Wednesday, I've got a full lesson plan readied for him and made another for Thursday!  Wednesday will be an ELA assignment on Peacocks using this lesson plan shared on PBS Learning Media.

Using the same tool, I created my own lesson on the Pledge of Allegiance.  It even includes a crossword puzzle that was generated using their puzzle tool.  My lesson isn't shared publicly, when I'm ready to do that with materials that meet all community guidelines, I will share the public links here.  From there, teachers can "quick assign" to get a student link to track the answers and assign to their own students.  As I'm still learning these tools, I'm not ready to make public lessons.

D&D School Has Begun!

The first day of D&D homeschool sessions has begun.  The hardest part, character creation.  Chase's character is a human fighter named Kai.  We started with character rolls, using 4 six-sided dice and taking away the lowest.  The other three numbers are added up for your Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence and Wisdom stats.  Looking at the Player's Handbook, we check the recommended builds for Fighter class, Strength and Constitution being the most important traits.  Chase chose to put his highest roll into Constitution to give his character more fortitude in combat.

Each roll is given a modifier, for example +3 on the roll of 17 for Constitution checks.

He did all the math himself.  Adding and modifying, customizing his character.  Moving on, we have Inventory after rolling for gold.  Our DM gave us some basic items to start with, but we bought the rest of our items, weapons and armor with our currency.  The Player's Handbook has a guide for the cost of each item.  Some items are only silver or copper, so the conversion works like this:  1 gp = 10 sp, and 1 sp = 10 cp.  Chase only bought his weapons and armor, but I spent nearly every coin my rogue had on adventuring trinkets to fill her pack.

Choosing skills and feats is the most time consuming part.  For this sets your character's abilities and will affect game play as we go on our adventures.  All told, the complete character creation process and a little bit of intro narration to place us in our setting, this took approximately 3 hours.  And he wasn't bored for a single second of it.  He sat in rapt attention as he did basic math, came up with creative stories for his character's personality and background and had quite a lot of writing to do.  He hates writing, but this was not something he hated at all.

Besides his character sheet, he also has a notebook, where he will be keeping track of his numbers, writing in notes about our adventures and adding background story for himself and other characters we encounter.  We're going to use his notes when we work on his school project, to build his own Role Playing Game (RPG) via RPG Maker VX Ace.  The story and characters from our D&D sessions will be featured in our game.

Not sure how long this will take us or how much we can finish, but perhaps we'll release the game for free at the end of it.  We'll be following tutorials to begin with.  RPG Maker Web has enough posted to give us about 11 weeks worth of lessons.  He can also earn badges for his progress via DIY.org, they have several categories for game design, character creation, and table top gaming.

I may make resources for this game engine, releasing content for others to use.  He may be doing a lot of the pixel art characters, but I may work on portraits and tile sets.  He should have no difficulty with the character sprites.  He really enjoys that style of art and can do it with most basic programs.  I think we have GIMP 2 on his computer, which he can use to work on this.  Any support for this project is appreciated.  I will be releasing content here and exclusives on Patreon.  Some resources may be released in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

We didn't unroll the map yet, that will be revealed next Friday.  Kevin made the map via Pyromancers, and simplified the textures for ease on our printer.  He had to use a program to do poster printing so the pieces would print actual size as our game mat.  Each square in the grid is 1"x1".  Then, he added texture with a crayon and I helped taping map pages together.

He made the cover for his notebook.  And he'll be adding pages in the Table of Contents as we go, just like all his other subject interactive journals.  Hopefully, his handwriting will improve.  It is pretty rough and we struggle getting him to write in proper case with legible spacing.  He loathes writing, though he loves to read.

This summer, he read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy after having read The Hobbit.  Currently, he is reading the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 'trilogy'.  I think he just started book 3.  I believe I own all 5 books, 4 are in a collection along with the short story Young Zaphod Plays it Safe.  His reading is on a high school level, but his maturity is on a juvenile level.  So, finding appropriate books is becoming a challenge.  Suggestions are always welcomed.  Our limits are on sexually mature content and darker themes.  A bit of violence is okay, but not too graphic or cruel.

For our upcoming art class, we will work on character portraits.  We plan to also select and paint miniatures.  Kevin plans to make tokens, which he may release on Roll20's marketplace.  So, there will be a lot of focus around gaming day this year.  Kevin isn't currently working, so we can maintain this for a while.  Plans will need to be adjusted once he does get a job and the baby is born.  For now, there will be plenty of motivation to keep school interesting.  Besides being cool, it is something we are all doing together.

I don't think we will be streaming game play.  One, our camera isn't very good and our lighting is awful.  The whole ceiling fixture doesn't work.  Secondly, Twitch has rules about underage persons appearing in a stream.  Even though I think there would be plenty of interest in D&D homeschooling, I agree that children should not be on that site.  We could use YouTube, but for the same reasons, moderation, etc...  Finally, there is Skype for the Classroom, however, we kinda hate Skype and it's a terrible program.

Interactive Journal, Interactive Fun

Trying to take a fresh approach to school this year, one that Chase seems to enjoy.  We'll be trying to work more in his journals opposed to strictly worksheets.  Last year, it was such a struggle to get him to do his written assignments, I didn't have the energy to do the journaling.  Preparing them can be a lot of work.

Today, we worked on two journals, Math and Science.  For Math, I made a small project, Groups of Two and Groups of Three.  I drew everything to fit in the notebooks and he colored, grouped and then labeled them and glued each into the book.  Finally, I had him write an equation to represent how many groups of twos and threes there were to reinforce the multiplication concepts.

I plan to be making some TpT material out of this.  Maybe offer the pumpkins and baseballs as clipart.  I find the clipart on there to be lacking and want to flood the site with my own art.  Of course, many of my materials have sadly been lost to our external hard drive crash, which we have not yet been able to recover.  I may have to rescan some things if I managed to keep them.  Some I just used the 'hard copy' for Chase's journals last year.  Or it's been misplaced in my mess of art supplies.  I need shelves.  And drawers!  A roll cart!

For Science, we made a quick cover for the notebook, which he decorated.  I wrote in his vocabulary words: Entomologist, Arthropods, Invertebrate, Exoskeleton, and Antennae.  I'm planning a unit on insects!  He wrote in the meanings and drew a picture of an ant enlarged with a magnifying glass.  This is his field journal, so we might need to take it outside to do some investigating.  Chase is terrible at identifying bugs.  He hates them.  But any time he sees one, he shouts, "Bug!" without telling us if it's a spider or a fly or a moth, etc...

So, we've gotten internet on my art desk computer.  Yay!  So now I can upload directly from creation.  And once we upgrade a bit, then perhaps, live art sessions.  We need an adapter to switch out the current motherboard with another we have stashed in the closet.  Which will have a better power supply and perhaps even on board audio.  This computer cannot even run headphones.

Well, I need to get back to creating new TpT materials.

"Candids"

Chase loves to have me take 'candids' like in Big Nate.

Weekend Prep

Writing this using the new tablet.  It is a challenge to write like this.   Texting isn't really my thing.  I still plan to get a stylus.  But, man, this thing needs to learn its autofill a little better.  It doesn't guess the words until after I've already typed the whole thing.

I wanted to share some of the things I've worked on this weekend.  Must see how easy it is to post a blog here and share pictures....  Here goes.

Not everything I posted from the Blogger app uploaded here.  I think due to my ISP timing out.  I had gone into detail about the journals I made and there were two more pictures that didn't post.  I'll have to retry with that here, but from the computer now.  It is still hard for me to type all that on such a tiny keypad.  I am a clacky typer!  

Above is the Field Journal, which will be used for grocery and library trips and anywhere else we might go.  It is a mini journal with 3"x4" pages.  The perfect size for small print outs.  I may be making some custom ones.  I'll need to do a journal post soon.  I've made him such wonderful journals.  I got to introduce him to them all today and he is most excited about his "Wreck This Journal, Please" one.  Inspired by "Wreck This Journal", which he saw and wanted so badly, I had to make him one.

I halved a spiral notebook.  This was a long process of snipping the wire, then cutting through several pages at a time with an exacto knife.  My paper cutter would not handle such a task. and I would have had to look for the big cutter.  It might not do a nice job, since it was used on shingles.  I used a paper grocery bag for the cover and he wrote the letters which I inked in the colors of his choosing.  On the inside, I have been adding creative ways for him to begin wrecking!  I've told him he can write all over the paper bag surface.  Boy did his eyes light up!

 These pictures are all taken with our new NeuTab N7 7''.  It's great for the price.  An Android device.  A little on the slow side, but such an incentive for Chase.  He is super excited about using it.  He only needs two more hole punches on his reward tickets to earn his first scratcher ticket.  I've printed out about 30 of my scratch card designs.  I used the color ones with white bg.  The others would likely be too much for my poor printer to handle.  Those are more meant for digital layouts rather than printing pages.

Speaking of the scratch tickets, here's how I made them.  First batch I used just silver paint with the dish soap, which is really transparent and thin.  So, I added a dab of black and it covered beautifully.  Only took 2-3 coats.

Okay, first, I printed out my sheets on cardstock.  Then I cut up some white labels and wrote the prizes on each.  I Put one in each box and used packing tape to laminate.  If you laminate properly, then you should get long life out of your cards, to reuse after they've been scratched off to redo the scratch paint.

I mixed my paint, acrylic silver, a small amount of black, and a drop or two of dish soap.  Mix until fully incorporated.  You can use any color you like, I recommend metallic ones as they will be the coolest!  But for holidays, it might be fun to mix up some colorful ones.  Dry between each coat.  I used a blow drier to speed up the process.  I masked out my second batch, it made them neater, however, I had to peel the tape at an angle to not peel off the paint entirely.  The first batch, I used my JoAnn Teacher Appreciation card to straighten the sides by pressing against the edges.  Or, you can leave it just as sloppy as you painted it!  ;D

Then I cut them out and laid them out to dry overnight to ensure they don't all stick together.  The cards look great.  (why didn't I take a picture?)  They fit into an old crayon box perfectly.  I've explained the rewards system so he is eager to behave well and earn those tickets!  I can't wait for him to scratch one off as well.

Oh my, it is late!  Recap, first day of school was great.  He was super excited about the tablet and brownie party and rewards.  He loved his new journals (I'll post those up soon, they look wonderful).  He got a little bored doing worksheets and writing work (the most dreaded thing ever) but he still had a good attitude and I tried to keep him motivated.  I used ClassDojo to track his behavior on the tablet.  They have a handy app.  I'll let him edit his avatar so he can enjoy it more.

p.s. There might be something awesome happening on the 20th, but I cannot say yet.  It is a secret still.  

Ms. Gillian Ivy's Class

Ms. Gillian Ivy's Class

The Classroom site is up and running.  We're using Google Sites, as that seemed the easiest as far as handling things like privacy and connection to the blogs.  Though the RSS feeds aren't as easily embedded as I would have hoped with both of them being Google.  And I couldn't find a decent widget to work with their sites.  So many codes like javascript do not work there.

So, here is how I'll be running it.  I'll have my blog here where I'll host my TpT items and just general about homeschool.  The assignments, etc for Chase to read will be on the class blog.  And he will have his blog that I co-admin to post his assignments to.

I'm nearly finished designing his blog.  It is red and dark themed as well, though not as dark as here.  His has a screenshot from one of his favorite games to play, Sanctum 2.  I'll have to teach him how to easily swap his backgrounds when he wants to change them.

In order for the RSS feed to work from his blog to the class blog, his blog is Public, however it is not listed on Google's blog lists.  Also, commenting is restricted and will go through me.  His online persona is XtroyX0r because he used to say 'Xtroy' instead of 'Destroy'.  And it's a cool name!  Obviously, he loves action and fighting games where destruction is a goal.  If you like Shooter/Tower Defense games, then Sanctum 2 is definitely recommended.  I used its mapping for Chase's class one day, with him designing a defense.  Well, here is XtroyX0r's Blog.  Unsure if he'll want to rename it.

XtroyX0r's Blog