Rocket Science

Wombat's choice of what to do this morning - just a bit of rocket science smile emoticon He is watching documentaries on journeys to deepest space and future spaceflight technologies, and using an app with realistic orbital physics to create and test his own rocket designs.

The app is Simple Rockets: "Kepler wrote the equations 400 years ago, and SimpleRockets uses those equations to model extremely realistic orbital physics. Players will learn about rocket science and astrodynamics while they are having a blast exploring the solar system."

Here are some of Wombat's creations.

Scorpion!

The other day my Mulga yelled out that there was a scorpion in the sandpit where he and Boronia were playing. It was not at all aggressive and I was easily able to gently coax it into a jar using a stick. 

Being homeschoolers we transferred it into our mini aquarium to observe overnight. We also happened to have a UV torch on hand. The next day I carefully transferred it back into the jar and we took it for a bushwalk and released it on our property well away from the house. 

I posted some pictures on facebook and was astounded by the number of people who did not realise we had scorpions in Australia - let alone this close to Sydney. I believe they are quite rare as this is only the second I have seen in 20 years of living out here. 

We are members of the museum and Wombat wanted to make sure we shared it to so we sent an email to them.

We think it might be a Mottled Scorpion from our research (http://www.foundation.qm.qld.gov.au/Find+out+about/Animals+of+Queensland/Other+Arachnids/Scorpions#.VPgEXPzLfYg).

From our understanding it would give a painful sting to an adult and may be deadly to a young child. We are hoping the museum will confirm our hypothesis. (Mulga got double pocket money for protecting himself and his sister by alerting an adult and keeping them both away.) 

NPWS volunteers

Spent a nice rainy day at Bent's Basin as NPWS volunteers. We were making flaps which were to be placed at the entrance of wombat burrows to test the effectiveness of this method for delivering medicine to treat mange in the wombats. Unfortunately the rain stopped us from going out to put the traps in place, and soccer has now started so we are unlikely to get the chance to go back and see how they worked unless they do a weekday run - but it was a great homeschooling experience nonetheless and one we enjoyed heaps.

Here be Dragons...

Today we varied our usual fare of dinosaur documentaries by watching a work of docufiction:

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This very entertaining presentation used the same CGI and animatronic techniques which are used to bring dinosaurs to life on the big screen to give the same credibility to dragons. This sparked a lot of interesting questions about how difficult it is to know if what we are watching onscreen is real, the way in which fictional stories can be presented as non-fiction, and the difficulty of knowing what is "truth" when we are thinking about things that happened millions of years ago. (We concluded that only God knows what actually happened, but that it is fun to speculate!)

African drumming workshop

Today we joined in with an African drumming workshop with other homeschoolers. We learnt about how the drums were made and the materials they are made from, and the boys learnt to play some increasingly complex rhythms. Boronia and the boys had fun playing with the other kids afterwards - Waratah even learnt how to play handball.

Praying mantises and particulate matter

Sprouted wheat seed which we used to make Essene bread. This is bread which uses only one ingredient, and is cooked at a very low temperature - it can even be cooked by the sun. Our first try was not a great success as we had difficulty grinding the "flour" fine enough.

Hard to see, but this was our experiment in particulate matter. There are 4 materials in the bags: wood, wheat, salt and sugar, each material having a large, medium and small particle size. The boys were challenged to identify the materials. We sorted them into materials and particle size, discussed how the various particle sizes were created, and why they might be needed (eg wheat seed for planting, cracked wheat couscous, grinding flour to make bread; wood for building, wood shavings for animal bedding, wood pulp for paper...). We then examined the materials under our field microscope and challenged ourselves to identify the difference between the finely ground salt and sugar crystals.

Waratah's latest pet. We have researched habitat and diet, and identified his gender (males have 6 segmented abdomens, females have 8).

Building a play space

The boys have been using logs left over from the big wind storm that brought down the top of one of our trees, and spare bricks and pavers to construct a play space to their own requirements. Both like to use it as a quiet space to sit and think, and rake designs into the dirt.