Plantains for Engineers

Working hard on the engineering pin for cub scouts the last couple weeks. We've been doing a lot of the projects this week. Interesting for sure but my living room looks like a storm hit, a horrendous storm which rains down tape, paper, straws, plastic bottles, pencils, cardboard, yarn, string and assorted building toys. The projects in progress are bridges, catapults, block and tackle, pulleys, I don't remember what else. We spent the most time on bridges since that is an area we haven't learned much about in the past. We viewed David Macaulay's Building Bridges DVD and made the building small bridge from the "extras" on the DVD afterwards. We looked up some pictures and information about a BBC2 show called Toy Stories where they are building real houses, bridges, gardens and more using children's toys such as lego, meccano, plasticine clay. We read some books from the library and our shelves about bridges, simple machine, physics and electricity. I found a super fun website Physics Games which the kids spent a lot of time at. We started with the Physics Games Bridge Game then we tried some of the other intriguing games. I'm sure we'll visit that site again. Now we are in the building phase of all this learning.

On another note for snack today we finally made Tostones a Mexican snack made by frying sliced plantanos/plantains then flattening them and then frying again! Finally you sprinkle salt on some and powdered sugar on others. This was from 2 weeks ago in our Spanish curriculum but we had a slightly hard time finding plantains. This was kind of good, kind of odd. Different, not horrible but not necessarily a recipe I'll rush to try again. Pretty greasy which I'm not a huge fan of. The kids seemed to prefer the powdered sugar tostones and the adults the salted ones. It reminded me vaguely of the time we made "french fries" using yams rather than regular potatoes. Hayley said they reminded her slightly of fried dough.

Tostones, one plate salted, one plate powdered sugar.


There is a straw bridge attached to our tables and lego all over the floor, must be learning happening here.


This baseball was able to cross the straw bridge.


Not much else really. The boys are moving along well in their work and Hayley is pretty well used to the Switched On Schoolhouse computer curriculum now. I forced myself to try and figure it out more so I could tweak her schedule and delete some of the repetitious stuff and the quizzes as I really don't think she needs to have quizzes every few days. It's just a time waster for a child who seems to retain the material just fine. Also I finally figured out how to mark the days we have busy outside activity days as non-switched on schoolhouse days so it won't assign her work those days. It's definitely a learning process to use this curriculum which is quite different to what we have used in the past. Hayley seems to like it though and it fills a need she expressed to work more independently this year.

Not much else, tomorrow will likely be more of the same as we have more bridges to build with common household items (which of course required a trip to the store as they weren't commonly common!) and castles to conquer with small catapults.