martinzoo

This week we made a board game to reinforce everything we have learn so far in our explorer unit. Instructions were provided on our cd. The board is a map of the world glued onto a file folder and colored. The spaces are just colored circles that your little ship lands on as you proceed around the board. The cards have different categories (I used card stock to make them more durable):

Green ~ vocabulary words

Orange ~ explorers and places they explored

Blue ~ parts of the ship and navigational equipment

Yellow ~ sailor expressions (such as “Shiver me timbers,” which is what a sailor would say when their ship inadvertently struck something, causing the ship to shake)

The game is simple. Shuffle all the cards. You start in Europe. Your opponent will read you the top card. If you answer correctly, you get to roll the dice and move your ship. If you don’t answer correctly you stay where you are. The first person to get to the New World is the winner.

It’s a tad embarrassing how much we’ve forgotten from the beginning of this unit. But we love the game and are relearning quickly.

Interesting tidbit:

The guy who invented the pH scale was trying to figure out how acid his beer was. In order to make beer or wine you have to use yeast. Yeast uses enzymes. And enzymes only work if the pH is right. He discovered that acids and alkali make the colors in plants change.

This is a pH scale. The “p” stands for potenz, which means the potential to be, and the H stands for Hydrogen. So you must write pH with a lower case p and a capital H.

We can duplicate his process by cutting up a red cabbage, boiling it in distilled water to eek out the deep blueish, purple color, then dropping the juice onto cut up pieces of coffee filter. This will create our own litmus paper. We can then dip the dried papers into various liquids to determine whether they are acid or base.

Here are some of the materials.

First we measured 3 cups of distilled water and poured it into a pan to boil.

Then we cut up a head of red cabbage. Put it in the boiling water and let it boil for several minutes, until the color was a deep, dark purple/blue. Then we removed the cabbage and let the juice cool.

Then we cut our coffee filters into two inch by 1/2 inch strips. Using an eye dropper, we dropped some of our juice onto the filter strips. Then let them dry. Now we have home made litmus paper. ( ppsstt - I actually have some litmus paper in my aquarium supplies, but it’s more fun to make your own….lol!)

Here, GB is dipping our paper into some soda. It turned pink (as expected) because it was acidic. One of the ingredients that I didn’t get a photo of, and I wished I had, was the lime juice. It had a fantastic red color, again, as expected. But that was cool.

We ended up doing many different ingredients: Vinegar was our control acid, Ammonia was our control base, water was a perfect neutral. The lime juice was red-acid, coffee was pink-acid, milk was purple-neutral, baking soda water was purple-neutral, bleach was blue-base, Windex was blue-base, soda turned pink-acid, and the fish aquarium water was purple-neutral (good!).

Now this is the part GB won’t tell you, we also tested spit and *trying not to wince* urine. The spit was purple-neutral. And the urine was RED- acid. ***Note to family members - Don’t tell GB that I told you we tested the urine. It was interesting but, he claims, embarrassing.