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: ...

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: Whe...

 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...

 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...

 Today, we created art by dangling a cup full of water and paint over a piece of paper. This technique is called pendulum painting and it relates to us later looking into harmonographs. After watching a few videos on YouTube about how to make a piece of art using a pendulum we set up one in our back garden, we did this by punching holes through a cup, threading string through it and finally, hanging it off of our washing line. We then (to protect the patio) put down an old bed sheet and got two A3 papers and taped them flat.  Once everything was in place, it was time for the paint. We chose black paint, since we had white paper, and used a phone to get a video to record our findings. Unfortunately, our first attempt was not very successful because instead of clean lines we got paint splatters. We thought that maybe the paint was too thick so we worked out the ratio 1:2 (One being paint and two being water) and set up attempt number two.  Our second attempt worked a lot be...

 Today we looked at plant cells under a computer microscope. We found that best results were from red onions because we could clearly see the different cells.  After looking at the photographs, we observed that the cells were very regular in size (either a squashy rectangle or oval) believe that this is because of the rigid cell walls that plant cells have.  magnified x150 magnified x100 We tried a few other plants but didn't have as much success seeing the cell walls. However, we do have some interesting photographs of close-up sunflower leaves and petals. Top of a sunflower leaf                                                            Underside of a sunflower leaf At the top left of this leaf are chloroplasts (the little green sacs) Although we used a computer microscope we learnt some theory abo...

 Science: Knitted Bacteria Today I finished my model of a unicellular organism, we thought that the best way to do this was to knit a model of a bacteria and label it with stickers. The project took us a few lessons but we are happy with the out come. Science teacher mum thought that making a model would be a good idea and I suggested that I use my knitting skills to do so.