Montessori Muddle – Page 25 – Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View

Dandelion Season

The last two weeks have been peak dandelion season here in eastern Missouri, so I’ve been experimenting with the culinary uses of the flowers.

Dipped in batter and fried, the flower heads did not taste like much. Probably too much seasoning and too much batter. It was good advice to cut off as much of the green outer covering (the sepals) because they are bitter. However, if you cut too close to the base of the petals they fall out all over the place, which is good if you want to collect just the petals.

Collecting the petals only is great if you’re trying to make dandelion wine (I’m adapting the second recipe from here), except that I’m only using petals (2 quarts). I keep the same amount of sugar (3 lbs), oranges (4), water (1 gallon), and yeast (winemaker’s). This is the appropriate timing for this project since we just covered the differences between aerobic respiration and fermentation.

Two quarts (about 4 liters) of dandelion flowers for making a gallon of wine.

The Chicken Coops are Here

Finding the right place for the chicken coops.

Now that we’re at the end of the academic year, our middle school business’ chicken coops have finally arrived (they were on back order). The kids had some fun finding the right spot for the coops, and we staked out an area for fencing; we plan to clip the birds’ wings.

Although, the coops came pre-assembled, the students needed to make some final adjustments.

Tomorrow, during math, they’ll be finding the perimeter so we can order fencing, and finding the area so we can know how much space we’ll have per bird.

Waves in the Creek

We talked about waves today down at the creek. The water was fairly calm so we could make some nice surface waves using floating leaves to show the up-down/side-to-side motion as the waves passed. I gave them 10 minutes to “play”, and more than one team tried to make a tsunami.

Since it’s allergy season, one student who could not go outside, read the chapter on the characteristics of waves and prepared a short–5 minutes–presentation for the rest of the class when we came back in.

Annotated image highlighting the crests of the waves and the wavelength.

The Apiary is in Business

As of this Saturday, we have two bee hives. With bees. Ms. Mertz and Mr. Deitrich received a pair of nukes (bees with a queen in a box) that were driven up, overnight, from Louisiana. They let them acclimatize for a few hours, with the nukes sitting on top of their respective hives, before putting them in. The nukes seem healthy; we were able to identify two queens and the bees were out foraging immediately. Ms. Mertz is happy.

Precision versus Accuracy

It’s possible to be precise but not accurate. It’s also possible to be accurate but not precise. These ideas are summarized very nicely in this diagram.

Explaining the meanings of the words "precision" and "accuracy". — Explaining the meanings of the words “precision” and “accuracy”.

Academic Geometry

I very much like the geometries in this picture. Even if he was studying pre-Calculus.

Hailstorm

A long winter is coming to an emphatic end with a series of dramatic spring storms. This hailstorm from April 3rd was one of the most remarkable I’ve experienced.

There was a bit of discussion about just how big the hailstones were. After all, could we say that the hail was the size of golf balls if only the largest were? Or would it be more honest to go with some sort of median or modal size.

Mr. Schmidt and Dr. Hurwitz discuss the semantics and logic behind the qualitative reporting of hailstone size.

Mrs. F. brought out the calipers and a rule for a few of the larger stones.

And I will report that the hail was large enough to put small dents in the roof of my car.

Hailstones banging off the roof of the schoolhouse, and off the cars in the parking lot.

The infra-red satellite image below shows the frontal system that dumped the hail on St. Louis.

Infra-red satellite image showing the clouds of the frontal system that affected St. Louis on April 3rd, 2014. Image from NOAA.

Weather map for April 3rd showing the mid-latitude cyclone that produced the hailstorm. Image from NOAA HPC.

The Eggs have Arrived

After waiting an eternity (about two weeks) the Middle School business’ eggs have arrived.

We set up the incubator downstairs in the pre-school/Kindergarden classroom so Mrs. D’s kids will have the chance of monitoring them. The little kids will be responsible for turning the eggs, while the middle schoolers have set up a data logger and a couple temperature probes to keep track of the temperature in the incubator.

The incubator was provided by Ms. Mertz. It’s put together out of plywood with a 75 W incandescent light bulb as the heat source. Unfortunately there is a significant thermal gradient and although we salvaged a couple of computer fans for the purpose we did not get around to installing them –and more importantly testing them– in the incubator before the eggs arrived.

We’ll see how it goes.