martinzoo

You remember my post about balancing the egg on the equinox, right?

Well, I had no idea that I would start a three-way ‘discussion’.

The conversation went like this:

This was from Christy at Ramsey Central Homeschool:

Okay you two— This is my take on the egg thing…
Number one: Equinox has no bearing on the ‘balance’
Number two: The balance I think, is because the yolk settles in the
bottomwhen they are in the carton. That makes it easier to balance.
Number three: When I balanced it, I did two hands and gently balanced
thenbounced it off my fingertips…until it balanced. And, I DID NOT USE
SALT JENNIFER!!! LOLOLOL! So, there you go! That is my two cents!

This was Jennifer’s (Toad Haven) response:

Supposedly you can shake it up and break the yolk up so that the yolk can

fall lower in the egg and lower the center of balance which will make it

balance easier. We tried that last year but were never able to break

the yolk when we checked after our failed attempts to balance the egg.

Guess you have a really steady hand and good eggs at your house, Christy.

Have you seen the artwork done by balancing lots and lots of eggs?

My response:

Nope, I haven’t seen the artwork. I’ve seen a few impressive sites,

though, since this discussion began. And everything I’ve seen leads me more and

more to the conclusion that it just can’t be done without tricks; salt on the

surface, scratched bottom of the egg, and now broken yolks. But, you know

Jennifer, we may try to do some of these tricks and see if we can get it

to work that way. It could be a way for GB to feel like the experiment was

successful.

Stay tuned!

Btw, Christy, were your eggs just regular, run of the mill eggs? I know

it’s been a while, do you remember?

Back to Jennifer:

Well, technically, you can get anything to balance as long as you can get

the center of gravity just above the point of contact with the table but

I’m not that good. Christy is going to work on it today and see if she can get

more to balance. She must have a really steady hand or really good eggs. I

just googled around and saw a class that “says” that they got their eggs

to stand on the tips without any tricks and they even sent in a picture but

I’m not convinced they didn’t have some sort of help. You know, white eggs

are bumpier than brown eggs and so my guess would be that it would be easier

to balance a white egg than a brown egg. I tried brown eggs in the past -need

to try white eggs now.

Balancing rocks and other things balancing

http://toadhaven.com/Rock%20Balancing.html

Christy’s shocking response:

Okay, you know I had to make a page about it—esp when I tried to balance

it on the glass table—So, Check it out:

www.ramseycentral.com/homeschool

Robin, I linked to your blog hope that is okay—lmk if you’d rather I

didn’t.

C.

And then my reply:

OMG~!!!

I am screaming with laughter over you two!!

I had no idea what I had started.

But ok, I’m off to give this a try. Unlike Jennifer, I am skeptical in my

abilities.

Oh, for crying out loud!!

I got it on the first try using Christy’s technique!!

I’m really shocked!

Back to Christy:

Yippppeeee! Send me a picture and I will put it on my page!

So here they are!!

Somebody smack me! I think I’m gonna faint!

Just a regular old egg from the carton.

I never thought it would really work. I bow my head to you, Christy. You were right!

Some people believe that there is a special kind of “balance” on the equinoxes, a force that can make a raw egg balance on its own end!

Do you think this is true? Is there some sort of cosmic “balance” that makes eggs stand on their own on the equinoxes, but not on other days? Is there a scientific way for us to test this?

One week before the equinox we did this “eggsperiment”

Materials Needed:

• Eggs (raw, in the shell)
• A smooth flat surface (and a steady hand)
• Confidence your kids will not break the eggs

Follow These Steps

1. 1. Before beginning the experiment, have students record their initial hypothesis in their journal. (Is there some special force that exists on the equinox that allows eggs to balance on end?)
      Use enough eggs so that there is one egg per child.
      Mark each egg, so each group uses the same egg in all tests (we made a cute little face with a sharpie pen).
      On a flat surface, have your child try to balance their egg on end. Then they should record their results. This experiment should be performed once a week for two weeks before the equinox, then on the equinox, and then for two weeks after the equinox. Be sure to refrigerate the eggs between experiments!

Here is a video to document our procedure and conclusions.

We tried the eggsperiment again after the equinox on Friday and Saturday. But we had no success. And, in fact, I looked it up online to see if other folks had been able to accomplish this amazing feat. I found this web page from 1999. We were kinda bummed. Because we thought there must be a way for us to be able to get it done.
So, then we thought that maybe it was the particular egg that we chose. We then proceeded to try the experiment on all the eggs in our carton: no go. It just didn’t work. Maybe there is a special technique, but we just don’t have it.

Anyway, I think for the next few months, periodically, we will give it a try with other eggs, just to see if we may get the results that Mr. Allen did.

Until then, I guess we mark this down as another failed experiment.

***

On a totally different topic…….. Don’t you think our video turned out cool? Other than GB referring to the equinox as an eclipse…LOL!

Either my deck is pretty comfy, or this squirrel has taken on my college kids’ attitudes.

He lay there for  a good two minutes - Time for me to run and get my camera and set it to zoom. Funny, huh?

This article appeared in our local paper this morning. It’s really nice to see homeschoolers portrayed positively in the news, isn’t it?

For home-schoolers, a place of discovery

Pocahontas State Park hosts programs that fit nature lessons

Saturday, Mar 08, 2008 - 12:08 AM Updated: 01:02 AM

Christen Miller (above), an interpreter at Pocahontas State Park in Chesterfield County, works with children during the winter/spring series of Discovery Programs for Home-Schoolers. Photo By: MARK GORMUS/TIMES-DISPATCH

By KATHERINE CALOS

TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

Think of kids running down a hill at Pocahontas State Park as raindrops starting to flow toward the Chesapeake Bay, and you’ll begin to understand how fun can be used to teach a lesson about the watershed.

The sunny-day romp was one of the ways a group of children worked off some energy and learned about pollution during the winter/spring series of Discovery Programs for Home-Schoolers.

Groups of home-schoolers have used the park as a resource for years by requesting programs that fit in with the children’s lessons.

Now the park is making it easier for home-schoolers who aren’t part of a group to take advantage of the resources. Programs — on insects, fish, a pond safari, vascular plants and nonvascular plants — continue into May. Previous topics included geology, birds, reptiles and amphibians.

A watershed, explained park naturalist Christen Miller on Wednesday, is the area that drains into a river or larger body of water. In Virginia, the land east of the mountains is generally in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The Richmond area is also in the James River watershed.

To show how pollution flows downstream, Miller brought out a plastic landscape called an Enviroscape.

The home-schoolers sprinkled cocoa and powdered-drink mix on the landscape to represent soil erosion and chemicals. Bits of styrofoam became litter. Chocolate milk represented sewage or oil.

Then they created raindrops from a spray bottle and watched as the runoff into their lovely lake made it look disgusting.

A few preventive measures kept the lake cleaner on a second try.

Vegetation “planted” with sticky tape along the edges of streams helped keep silt from washing into the water. Fences kept cows out of the streams so they wouldn’t stir up the water and deposit manure in it.

Earthen berms made of clay contained overflow from the sewage treatment plant. Farmers and homeowners had learned not to overfertilize, keeping excess nutrients out of the streams.

“Let’s make it rain and see if it looks quite so bad,” Miller said. Even though “it’s not possible to keep 100 percent of the pollution out of the lake,” the modifications made a difference.

Talking about watersheds tends to make people’s eyes glaze over, said Miller, referring to her experience on summertime canoe trips on the park lake. She keeps talking about it anyway because it is important.

“We’re all connected,” she said. “The watershed is a way to see that connection.”

GB was disappointed that the photographer didn’t get him in the newspaper. But never fear, because MY camera was near. These were my pictures from the same day.

The kids run down the hill, representing raindrops converging on the lowest point.

GB was a bit of pollution within the raindrops

Here, he shakes powdered cocoa to represent soil erosion, and it’s impact on pollution. Other kids sprinkled red, powdered Kool-aid to represent fertilizer. There was also chocolate syrup to represent sludge from cars and factories.

GB produces ‘rain’ with a squirt bottle.

Here you can see the pollution running into the unprotected Chesapeake Bay.

This is how polluted the bay would look if there were no protective measures in place.

Thanks to State and Federal environmental protections, we have ‘wetlands’ (represented by the green felt) and restrictions on factories and fertilizers. These protections should help the health and safety of the bay.