For my regular reader you can see that I have finally updated the website. The main goal was to make it friendly to mobile devices. Yes it was old enough that it was very hard to read on anything but a computer.

Ian did more on his investigation of structures. This week we had him build a bridge out of Keva blocks. To provide a sufficient gap I took a leaf out of our table. His first structure ingeniously used the existing structure of the table. I of course had make the challenge more difficult. It took a while and demonstrating balance but he succeeded.

We wanted one good experiment for Margaret to do a write up on. It didn’t work out that way but it was still a cool experiment. The idea is to heat magnesium to a high temperature and thus oxidize it. The result would be Magnesium Oxide. Since we are adding oxygen we end up with more material and that can be measured. The problem was that my scale only does grams so I would need a whole gram of magnesium and I was scraping it off a firestarter. We did get the scale to show a difference. Eg burnt was now 1g but the scale is not accurate enough to do it right. Margaret quickly came up with the answer to what happened and we discussed it.

I had a number of questions about the Raspberry Pi last week. We bought ours from Robotshop.ca. There is also a US (it is a US company) site: Robotshop.com.

We did a fieldtrip on Tuesday to our local museum. The homeschool group had organized a session on how our first nations people lived before we arrived. The got to hear some of the oral histories on the local people, handle some artifacts. They also talked about the arrival of the first settlers and the stories the first nations had of their arrival. The also did an archeological dig and found arrow heads.

On the weekend we had Canadian Thanksgiving and went to Grandparents for dinner. I was responsible for the pies. Margaret made a traditional pumpkin pie and I made a pumpkin chiffon pie with pecan and gingersnap crust.

We also went for a walk with more grandparents. There is a nice park near our house that is a protected wetland and as such has lots of ducks and other wildlife. We found fresh scat that was most likely from a coyote.