Rocks, Science and other things

We'll start with other things....Now that Narnia has passed on, Kevin and the girls made the glass home more crab friendly and we moved it upstairs to their room. This left space in our school room for Juniper.

So now Snappers is in the girls' room. We've been working on creating a nature/science space for the girls in their room. We hung this cool butterfly collection Kevin got me years ago. A large piece of obsidian sits on top of the highest shelf (it's a bit sharp so it needs to be out of reach), as well as the urchin shell we found in Canada last summer.

Do you see the two sets of plastic drawers in the above picture? While Kevin was in Nicaragua, we set off to find a reasonable way to catalog our growing rock and shell collection. We stopped at Goodwill to see if they had anything we could use.

It turns out they had everything we needed! We found two sets of drawers and several different types of trays we could put inside to hold the rocks and shells.

This is Sydney's.....

She has even numbered the rocks so you can easily find them.

And here are the drawers from Kayleigh's.....

We also have a nice collection of these pamphlets that are stored in one of the drawers.

Another thing the girls did while Kevin was gone was to choose some of their favorite rocks/minerals and then write poems. They both need some work on writing poems, but they had so much fun doing this. We looked up images of the rocks/minerals they chose, and printed them out. Then we took photos of the real rocks/minerals.

Here is Sydney's...

And Kayleigh's....(the geode pictured here is one we got her for Christmas. We put geodes in each of the girls' stockings and then broke them open with a hammer.)

While we were in Sunriver earlier this month, we found a Rock and Gem store that had thundereggs available for purchase. You could choose whichever one you wanted and then they would cut it open for you.

Kevin chose this one on the left. He was hoping for a fairly hollow one so chose according to weight. We were all pleasantly surprised at how beautiful and unique it was inside. The owner of the shop really seemed to like it, so Kevin offered to let him keep half if he let Kevin pick another half. So that's how we got the one on the right.

This is the left one cut open

And this is the right one

Sydney chose to spend some of her birthday money and chose this moroccan geode.

She was very excited to see how beautiful inside.

And finally, here are some cool shells Kevin picked up on the beach in Nicaragua.