Home School Jules

Today we have had some fun with glacier fruits and made some stained glass biscuits and attempted to blow bulbs like proffessional glass blowers. We followed a biscuit dough recipe and cut out our shapes and filled them with crushed glacier fruits, and with the left over sweets we tried to create blown glass spheres. After seeing The King Of Random's video (insert link here) on blowing jolly ranchers, an American sweet similiar to glacier mints/fruits, we melted our sweets and wrapped the now melted sweets around our reuseable straws. We were not very successful since we kept on bursting but we could see how the experiment would have worked with more practice.  I have been looking at bonds in science and was wondering how the bonds in sugar. So we found a Candy making website to see how candy is made and the different bonds. The bonds between the molecules in sucrose (what sugar is made up of) are covalent bonds, which means the two atoms share one electron. Shown by this diagram:

Since Christmas is around the corner, we decided that we should learn a few songs to celebrate, after enjoying playing in the Preview's concert so much. Dad and I have already started practising and are attempting to add bells into more upbeat carols like, "Jingle Bells" and a few others.       

Friction is a force that acts against a moving object or prevents a stationary object to move if a force is applied to it.  It is described as an OPPOSING FORCE. To relate this to skateboarding we have decided to illustrate some of the statements in my GCSE book using skateboarding.   1)If an objective has no force propelling it along it will always slow down and stop because of friction.   Example: If you stop scooting your foot on the floor, you will eventually come to a stop. 2)Friction always acts in the opposite direction to movement. Example: Your board slows down because of friction force pushing against the direction you are going. 3)To travel at a steady speed the driving force needs to balance the frictional forces. Example: The reason why you have to keep scooting on a flat surface. 4)You get friction between two surfaces in contact or when an object passes through a fluid (drag).  A fluid can be either a liquid or a gas.   Example: When you are going down a ramp and you can

 Last night I changed the bearings on my skateboard, which lead us to ask some questions about friction and forces. With dad's help, I unscrewed the wheels of the board, popped out the old bearings and replaced them with Reds Precision Skate Bearings. With the new bearings in place, we wanted to see the difference between the two. So we screwed on my brothers old bearings on one wheel to see the difference. The video below shows how much longer the reds bearing last, this is because the reds have less friction and are more spherical in shape.  You can see that the new bearings allow the wheels to continue spinning for longer than the old ones. The wheels all weigh much the same and the axels are all made of much the same materials so this difference in how long they spin for must be mostly down to the differences between the bearings.  Bones Redz bearings are produced to a very high standard of precision in their "sphericity" and are made of a high grade steel that is ver

With the new restrictions due to the national lockdown for Covid19 we needed to find an alternative PE activity. Tom has been enjoying his skateboard adventure so far so Jules decided to try this out too. We ordered a board and safety pack online and these arrived earlier this week. Here's some footage of Julia's first trip to the local park:

 In a science lesson before the half term break, we did a practical lesson using pondweed and a lamp. Unfortunately, we didn't get the results we wanted because it was winter and our lamps were not powerful enough but we found an image that shows what should have happened. However, we had a much more successful experiment that shows how leaves can preserve more water. Pondweed Experiment: The experiment is supposed to show how photosynthesis works with the lamp acting as the sun. The plant in the water is placed in next to the lamp and should make bubbles (oxygen leaving the plant as a result of photosynthesis) and as the lamp is put further away, the amount of bubbles the plant makes should decrease. This photo is from our pondweed experiment where we have one bubble circled in red. We expected a lot more bubbles but at most; only had three. How photosynthesis works is outlined in the following equation: carbon dioxide + water, activated by light energy and chlorophyll = glucose a

After seeing dad's post on our cover of Monster Mash, I thought of a few songs that I think we should play in the picture-in-picture format. My first idea was In Hell I'll Be In Good Company by Dead South, which we have already played and recorded before, with me on the piano, dad on the ukulele and possibly my brother Tom on the saxophone. This is what our cover of Dead South's song sounds like now: I have just printed some sheet music for St James Infirmary Blues but it could take a while to get that piece to a playing standard. Along with St James Infirmary, we have also recently got St Louis Blues which my brother could play along with.  We have considered La Vie en Rose and Somewhere Over the Rainbow which are ideal pieces for what we want but would need to find the sheet music or work out the melody for. I would like to play Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen but I am still learning that piece. Are there any pieces I have mentioned or pieces that you know that you think we sh

 Jules and I were invited to put a couple of numbers together for the local open mic lockdown performance at The Preview And we opted for a cover of Bobby "Boris" Picket and the Crypt Kickers Monster Mash, what with it being Halloween and all. Here's a copy from the family YouTube account: But this got us thinking about how to put together a multi-instrumental track with picture-in-picture videos of ourselves playing different insturments or signing. So here's a new project that we can take on. The only thing left to decide is what we should record and how many pieces we should include.