Cabin Fever Beating Boredom Buster - #1

Perusing Mr. Poppers Penguins...

...while preparing peanuts...

...for a pleasant snack of...

...protein packed peanut butter...

...to be eaten while pontificating with pronouncements prefaced  in " p" whenever possible.

Snow Block Construction - One More Igloo

Warmer temperatures, and the remains of melting snow drifts in our yard, made the conditions perfect...

...for getting outside for a little more architectural exploration.  I gave the girls small plastic storage boxes to use to form blocks from the icy snow...

...for constructing...

...arches...

...and castle walls...

...and an igloo (of course).

It turns out...

...building an igloo...

...out of snow...

...is much easier, than using Styrofoam blocks.

And although it was too small to allow for the girls to build it from the inside in proper fashion...

...it turned out to be stable enough to allow for a door to be hollowed out by hand, without hurting the structural integrity.

By the time they were finishing up the igloo...

...by filling in the chinks with snow...

...a cold wind had picked up, and the sun was beginning to set.  Before we called it a day, I placed a low-heat, LED inside the igloo ...

...so they could continue to enjoy their creation from inside...

...where it was warm.

Bannaberries and Coffee Juice - A Breakfast Conversation

"Alaska wild berries" by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - [1]. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

T (age 17, looking at a plate of chocolate chip muffins) -We should start making blueberry muffins for breakfast.

E (age 10) - I don't like blueberries.

A (age 13) - I like strawberry muffins.

E (age 10) - I don't like strawberry muffins.

T (age 17) - What kind of berry muffins do you like?

E (age 10) - I don't like berry muffins.  I only like chocolate chips.

D (age 11) - Strawberries aren't berries.  Mom can you look that up?  Is that right?

Me (Sitting across the room at my computer, with a cup of coffee, and toast, instead of a muffin) - I'm thinking you know that's right or you wouldn't have said it. (Typing in the search "are strawberries berries?" and reading the result).

Strawberries and raspberries aren't really berries in the botanical sense. They are derived from a single flower with more than one ovary, making them an aggregate fruit. True berries are simple fruits stemming from one flower with one ovary and typically have several seeds.Feb 25, 2014
Bananas Are Berries? - Stanford Magazine - Article

Me - Bananas are berries?

C and E (ages 8 and 10) - Bananaberries? That's funny.

T (age 17) - What do you mean berries aren't berries?  Then why do we call them that?  Who even names these things?

Me - (typing in a search for "berry", and reading to myself)

In botanical language, a berry is a simple fruit having seeds and pulp produced from a single ovary; the ovary can be inferior or superior.
Examples of botanical berries include:

• Avocado (Persea americana) a one-seeded berry
• Banana[1][2]
• Barberry (Berberis; Berberidaceae)
• Bearberry (Arctostaphylos spp.)
• Bilberry
• Blueberry
• Coffee berries
• Cranberry
• Crowberry (Empetrum spp.)
• Currant (Ribes spp.; Grossulariaceae), red, black, and white types
• Elderberry (Sambucus niger; Caprifoliaceae)
• Gooseberry (Ribes spp.; Grossulariaceae)
• Indian gooseberry (Phyllanthus emblica)
• Garcinia gummi-gutta, Garcinia mangostana, and Garcinia indica (Vrikshamla)
• Goji berries (Wolfberry)
• Grape, Vitis vinifera
• Honeysuckle: the berries of some species are edible and are called honeyberries, but others are poisonous (Lonicera spp.; Caprifoliaceae)
• Lingonberry/Cowberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea)
• Persimmon
• Mayapple (Podophyllum spp.; Berberidaceae)
• Nannyberry or sheepberry (Viburnum spp.; Caprifoliaceae)
• Oregon-grape (Mahonia aquifolium; Berberidaceae)
• Pumpkin
• Strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo), not to be confused with the strawberry (Fragaria)
• Tomato and other species of the family Solanaceae
• Watermelon

Me - Okay, so berries include watermelon, pumpkin, bananas, a few actual berries - cranberry, elderberry, gooseberry...oh, and coffee beans!  Does that mean my coffee counts as a juice?

T (age 17) - Pass the muffins, please.

A Tensegrity Icosahedron Model (or that cool collapsible thing from Little Man Tate)

A tensegrity icosahedron model, is one in which a 20 faced polynomial is outlined by free hanging struts, suspended in the tension of elastic bands. 

I'll be honest, I don't really know what its purpose would be.  But, I can tell you, a tensegrity model of a icosahedron is the cool collapsible shape Fred Tate made in the 1991 movie Little Man Tate.

And, not only is a lot of fun...

...to twist...

...and squish...

...and flatten, as you explore a three dimensional plane in motion...

...it turns out, it's also very easy to make.

All you need is -

• 6 unsharpened pencils
• 6 heavy duty rubber-bands, long enough to fit comfortably around the length of the pencils (elastic string tied securely into bands, will work as well).
• 12 pencil erasers
• and instructions.

We followed YouTube instructions made for a Los Angeles Trade and Technical College's Architectural Department project.




Don't worry about having slotted dowels, and plastic caps, like in the video.  All you have to do is loop the bands over the pencil ends, and hold them in place with the erasers.

Oh, and be warned, if you go looking for (and manage to find) a copy of Little Man Tate to watch with your children - there is a lot of great math, engineering and art to be found...but also a good dose of language, and a touch of adult subject matter to keep in mind.

Engineering For Teens, Styrofoam Block Igloos, Or After the Arch

While their snow fort melted, and collapsed outside...

...the older girls (ages 13 and 15) were hard at work inside, perfecting their igloo building skills.

They cut Styrofoam project blocks (non-affiliate link) into spiral circles, angled slightly inward...

...following the example of Tupak and Attic Utak, our new Inuit friends.

Then, after some trial and error, they settled on loosely stacking blocks on top of the base, into a sort of circular pyramid...

...with gravity holding them in place...

...against a central keystone, at the top...

Snow blocking tunnels were added for aesthetics, as being foam, and not snow, the blocks did not cement themselves together enough to allow for doors to be cut in the sides.

They might not have been strong, or stable, but they were standing - which was an accomplishment in and of itself.  I won't say it was an impossible project, just one that made building ice cube arches...

...seem elementary.

Building a Snow Fort

The weather finally warmed up enough for the children to head outside.  I passed by the kitchen window on my way to fold the endless pile of laundry, and saw them marching around in a circle.  It was a little strange, but I thought - well you know, they've been stuck inside for a while.

A little while later, when I glanced back out to check on them, I realized there was a method to their madness - they were marking out the outline of a snow fort.

They didn't quite manage an igloo, which is what it looked to me like they were going for...

...but by the time they came in for a hot chocolate warm up, I had found this fun, old, Canadian documentary to show them how close they had come to being on the right track.

How to Build an Igloo by Douglas Wilkinson, National Film Board of Canada

They got a pretty big kick out of watching Tupak and Attik Utak build their temporary structure.  In fact, they picked up so many useful pointers, they're hoping for another arctic blast, and looking around for a good Inuit style snow knife, or two.

Of course, the forecast for today is for sunshine, and a high 42°F, not exactly Igloo building weather.  I wonder what Inuits used to build in the summer...

Minecraft, Cookies, Math - and Jules Verne.

We've made Minecraft themed cookies before...

...and we've used cookies to study surface area and volume...

...but we've never combined the two, and we can always use review.  So, while the children were busy adding a Steve, and pick-ax to our Perler bead play-set...

...I was mixing up a batch of sugar cookie dough, coloring it with drops of green food coloring, and unsweetened cocoa powder, to be flattened out into 1/4'' deep squares, and rectangles ready to be covered, and placed into the refrigerator for a few hours...

...so they'd be nice and easy to cut, with a butter knife, into 1/4'' (more or less) cubes (more or less).

My youngest (ages 8 and 10), remembering the Minecraft mosaic cookies from the summer, were not overly surprised when I asked for help piecing together a Creeper face.  And, since we'd just reviewed area the day before, they were ready when I asked them what the area of our cookie face was.  It was an easy one anyway, 10 cookie cubes by 10 cookie cubes equaling 100 cubes of cookie dough.  That sounds like a lot of cookie cubes...

...but we weren't done, because Creepers don't just have height and length...

...they also have depth.  The girls and I made up, and baked 10 - 10x10 cube cookies, making sure the outside cookie cubes were green, or white "Creeper colors".  Then, once they were cooled, the girls frosted them together, into a single, large, cube shaped, Creeper head.

Ideally, we would have stacked up all 10 cookies for a 10x10x10 cube block.  But of course, the cookies had puffed up some while baking, and the frosting layers added some depth, so we only needed 6 of our cookies to make a cube...

...that was 10 cookie cubes high, deep, and wide.  We measured the sides of the cube with a stack of extra cookie cubes, just to be sure.

Not that the girls really cared.  They had the idea down - a cookie measuring 10 cookie cubes by 10 cookies cubes by 10 cookies cubes has a volume of 1000 cookie cubes, even if it only took 600 cookie cubes, and a few layers of frosting to create. 

They were ready to move on, and asked if they could use the extra cookie cubes (of which there were a surprising amount - baked as large cookies, and then cut completely apart, while still warm) and some of the left-over frosting to build there own things.

At first I was disappointed, that instead of staying with our Minecraft and Math theme, they were building strange little people...

...and some kind of island (with plans of adding a cave).

But then, I listened a little closer to their excited, giggling chatter, as they planned, and worked, and realized they were playing out a cookie reenactment of a scene from Jules Verne's Mysterious Island.  And, you know, trite or not, that really is the way...

...the unschool cookie crumbles.