The Beals School For Boys: September 2012

Monday, September 17, 2012

Artful Projects # 2 ~ Puff Painting

We were going to go outside and try our hand at colorful bubble painting, but that will have to be another time.. because when we woke up this morning, it was pouring down rain. (It's still raining, as this is being typed.. might have to think about building a boat for math and science class! LOL!)

So, The Momma decided to try something she had read about on another homeschool blog. It was called "puff painting".

Puff paint is actually paint that is raised up off the paper. It looks really cool, but it isn't cheap to buy. So.. The Momma decided to make ours. She figured, she makes pretty much everything else, why not this?

Here is a list of the things you will need:

1 cup of flour

1 cup of water

1 cup of salt (although The Momma only used 1/8 cup)

Food coloring

squeeze bottles

Mix the flour, water and salt together. Then put into different squeeze bottles (we actually got ours from some "make your own gummy bear" kits The Momma had purchased a couple years ago. When she makes our gummy bears, she doesn't use them, so they had been sitting in the cupboard lonely and neglected until now) Add a couple drops of food coloring, then shake! You can add more drops if you want darker colors.

We chose green, yellow, red, purple, orange and blue for our colors.

The Momma suggests using card stock paper. It's much thicker then normal paper. It would have been really cool if we had black paper, but we didn't, so card stock it was (it worked great!)

We had a lot of fun.. and learned that you really don't want to squeeze the bottles, as it will just make a huge glob. You just want to let it kind of flow...

Here are our masterpieces!

AJ did a flower after his big blob didn't really look like anything.. LOL!

IC made a house.. then decided to make it more into a car

RW made a fish

Even The Momma decided to make something.. it's more "abstract art" then anything in particular she said..

This turned out to be a fun project!

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Science Project: Fuses In Use

Where Did You Find the fuse block? There were 2! One under the hood next to the battery, the other under the steering wheel.

How many fuses were there? 22 under the steering wheel, 19 under hood. There were bigger ones under the hood though. We found out that a lot of the engine's things take electrical current, and they all run through that block, while the fuses under the steering wheel were mostly for things inside the van it's self.

Were any burned out? How many? None! All were in working order

If you found any burned out fuses, which circuits were they protecting? There were none burned out.

Why do you think the car manufacturer put fuses in the circuits of the car? It keeps the electricity safe and going where it should go to make things run.

RW looking at the fuse block under the steering wheel

Counting how many fuses there are

Looking at the fuses under the hood.

Course, that wasn't enough.. we started talking about other things that weren't on the list. Talking about where we thought the charge from the batter went if it didn't go to the fuse block stuff like that. We also looked to see which fuses were for which things in the van. Did you know that the radio only takes a #10 fuse.. and the hazard lights take a #25! That surprised us. We also found that the windshield wipers have THREE different fuses! We guessed that one fuse per wiper (since there are two on the windshield and one on the back window).

Friday, September 7, 2012

Artful Projects # 1

So, we were looking for things to do, because we were EXTREMELY bored.. Extremely. Good thing we got a great craft book the last time we went to the library. :) So, for our art projects, we decided to make these to go with our toys.