Highlights from the Past Two Weeks

Last Wednesday we talked and read about volcanoes and then made them ourselves with some clay, discarded water bottles, and baking soda and vinegar. It took me awhile to get the reaction right (it ranged from fizzing within the bottle to the bottle exploding and drenching the ceiling) but I finally settled on putting two cups of vinegar in first, then three drops of food coloring, six drops of soap, and finally, 3 tablespoons of the baking soda itself, wrapped up in a toilet paper packet so that it would slowly be released into the vinegar. It worked awesome and my kids were having so much fun it wouldn't have mattered anyway. The highlight was probably when I was doing the demonstration and caught one of my kids turning between me and his table to take notes, his eyes wide in rapt attention, and I almost broke down laughing.

This Wednesday we talked about storms and weather, and then we made tornadoes in a bottle. This is when you essentially put water in a two-liter bottle and tape another one to the top. When you flip it over and swirl, you get a vortex as water goes down and air comes up. I went to the recycling center with Jordan, my roommate, over the weekend, and trash-picked over 40 bottles. My kids were pretty confused when I told them we were going to make tornadoes in a bottle, but when I spun the one I had made ahead of time, the room filled with cries of "Yoooooooo!" and "That's hot!" and I knew we were in for a good afternoon. (Sometimes I feel like I'm doing a cooking show: "And next you put it in the oven for forty minutes. Now here's one that I did ahead of time!") The next couple days I had kids in other camps or classes asking me how to make tornadoes in a bottle.

This Thursday was my last day at Rosedale, as I'll explain in my next post, and during homework time I was trying to get the noise down to a workable level, when Bryan asked me for help with his homework. He usually does his homework pretty quickly without any help, so I was curious as to what he needed. As it turned out, his assignment was to interview a family member about a story from his family history and record it. "Mr. Matt," he told me, "you're not really in my family, but you're my Urban family, so I want to interview you!" I told him a story about my grandparents, but it was a rough reminder of what I'm leaving behind.