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Borax Snowflakes

It’s been getting colder and colder…this might have something to do with the fact that it’s winter…anyway, we thought we’d make some winter craft. And what is more wintry than a snowflake?

We made ours using borax and pipe cleaners using the instructions found here. What you need to do is to twist some pipe cleaners to form a snowflake shape and then tie a string to one point of the snowflake, this is then attached to a pencil and hung in a jar. The jar is first filled with boiling water and borax (3 tablespoons of borax per cup of water) which is mixed until all borax is dissolved, add food colouring if you want. Then lower your snowflake shape into the jar and let the borax do its thing! Let this sit overnight and you should be left with a pretty snowflake. I say “should” because our first attempt didn’t result in a snowflake, just some wet pipe cleaners. The problem may have been the pipe cleaners we used:

This was actually the photo I took after they’d been in the solution overnight. See what I mean?

sure, they were pretty, but the borax slid right off them because they were glossy (at least that’s what I think the problem was), it might also have been that some small child was moving the jars. So the borax solution ended up being used as a toilet cleaner – not necessarily a bad thing – it does say on the pack that it can be used as a toilet cleaner. Interestingly, no mention of snowflakes on the pack!

Okay, attempt two with new pipe cleaners – the fluffy kind:

We prepared our borax solution and snowflakes and hung them and went off and enjoyed a rather yummy breakfast at a local café.

Fast forward a little over one hour later and we return home to find this:

aaaaghhhh!!! This was not what we wanted to see. Thankfully, it didn’t get any worse. The good news was that the borax was starting to attach itself to the pipe cleaners.

The next morning we had borax crystals attached to our pipe cleaners – still not great, though.

Here we go again…attempt number three:

This time we made them to look like these Martha Stewart ones and we added a lot more borax.

Someone got a little carried away with the blue food colouring!

Finally, we have snowflakes!!

Linking to:

Tags: borax, borax crystal snowflakes, borax crystals, borax snowflake, craft, crystal snowflake, Homeschool, Homeschooling, pipe cleaners, pipecleaners, science, snowflake, winter

Comments 6 Comments
Categories Homeschooling

New Classroom – Part 2

18 May

I’m ba-ack!

Since I had an underwhelming number of suggestions on what colour to paint my desk, I stuck with being completely and utterly boring, and painted it cream (also because we already had that paint).

That’s okay because I’m really pleased with how it looks.

The “desk” is actually a console table, so it’s a bit squishy when I’m using it. I wanted to find something small enough to fit next to it (there isn’t much room where my desk is) to give me some extra storage… and then I found this on the side of the road, someone was throwing it out, and I thought the size of it would be perfect to fit next to my desk.

It was a bit on the ugly side, so I spray painted it white and made a fabric “skirt” to go around it.

The room is almost complete!

You can see the rest of our classroom here.

PS Please excuse the different photo sizes, I accidentally ruined the settings on my camera without realising it :-/

Tags: classroom, desk, desk makeover, featured, Homeschool, homeschool classroom, makeover, room makeover

Comments 5 Comments
Categories Homeschooling

Welcome to Our New Classroom

12 Dec

We’ve survived our first year of homeschooling!

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for our classroom.

I know it wasn’t that long ago that we made-over our classroom, but if you look back at it you’ll notice that Millymoo’s desk was rather small. She had definitely outgrown it, so it was time to come up with a new plan. Also, even though the bigger desk was pretty, it didn’t have a lot of workspace. The other problem with the bigger desk was that it had a shelf thing on the bottom of it, which meant that the chair couldn’t be pushed in all the way, this took up valuable floor space.

Here’s how it looked before:

A quick (okay, maybe not so quick!) trip to Ikea and…

here’s how it looks now:

I love how uncluttered it looks. The girls are really happy with their new workspace too.

Moving on to the other side of the room.

This is where I sit – it needs a bit of work, actually make that a LOT of work! My desk needs painting, so does a trolley/storage unit that I found. I also want to change the colour of the frames on the wall behind my desk – I don’t like them black, maybe I’ll paint them the same colour as my lamp. As for my desk, I’m undecided as to what colour to paint it. I think the room has a lot of white now and maybe something a little brighter would look nice.

Any suggestions?

Update: Our Classroom is now finished. You can see the rest here.

Linking to:
The Nature of Grace
Real Mom Resources

Tags: classroom, Homeschool, homeschool classroom, makeover, room makeover

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Categories Homeschooling

Science Project – Edible Cell

28 Nov

This post proudly brought to you by Candy ♥

In science, I have been learning about cells of all different shapes and sizes. To make things more interesting, I made two edible cells, one plant cell and one animal cell.

Here’s how I did it:

I used the following things to make my cells:

2 packets of jelly crystals (red for animal and green for plant)
Mini marshmallows
Cake sprinkles
Jelly beans
Fruit strips (sliced thinly)
Fruit-shaped lollies

1. Make the jelly according to the packet directions.

2. Pour each jelly into separate moulds – I used plastic take-away containers.

3. Put them in the fridge until they have almost set.

4. Once they have almost set, take them out of the fridge and arrange the lollies to make them look like cells – having a picture there is helpful. I used these ones as a guide.

5. Put the jelly back into the fridge until they are fully set.

6. Ta-da! You have made your very own edible cells.

My sister wanted to make her own cells, this is her animal cell:

* My mum wanted you to know that the cell lesson plan was taken from here.

Tags: animal cell, edible cell, Homeschool, plant cell, science

Comments 4 Comments
Categories Homeschooling

Pointillism Painting

14 Nov

I saw this art lesson at Kinderart and thought it looked like it would be fun to do; something that both girls would be able to do – since there is a six year age gap.

The girls didn’t want to paint the picture that was suggested, so we searched for some other paintings by George Seurat and they settled on this one:

Pointillism is a technique of painting where you apply small, distinct dots of pure colour in patterns to form an image. We used cotton buds to dab on the paint. The full instructions on how to do this can be found here.