I‘ve always been a bit meh about natural and built landscapes. I mean it’s so obvious – do we seriously need to point this one out? But then a whole series of little things happened at once, as they do, and I realised that maybe it does need to be discussed. Not taught as such, because even toddlers work out the differences between plants and buildings pretty quickly, but part of the conversation – how do people change the environment? How is life different now to what it used to be? Don’t forget that as far as little kids are concerned the world has always been this way. And what messages are we subconsciously sending through our choices of images and activities?

When I look at my photos and craft, it is unrelentingly NATURE. I’m not certain why this is, although the fact that I choose to live in the middle of nowhere is probably a pretty good clue. But I ruthlessly crop photos and draw and paint trees, fish, flowers, butterflies or abstract patterns. No buildings or cars to be seen. And yet, I wouldn’t be here without the roads, power lines, cars and fences I don’t include. Air conditioning and houses. Schools.

Built things can be very, very good. And nature can be pretty darn annoying, as I run out and scare off the hawks for the umpteenth time today. So I set a little challenge – to include built things in our art and photos. To represent the world the way it is, rather than only bits and pieces of it. To stop treating some things as if they were bad and instead look at the whole. And to talk to my kids about it – how clever we are and how we have a responsibility to think.

The part of my backyard I usually crop. Home made piece-meal fences, the shadecloth is from an old chicken enclosure, the rest of it has been re-used. The rope across the gap is a temporary fence to stop horses coming into the house yard.

One thing that is unique about our place is that it is a hobby farm, and we inherited a truly mind-blowing amount of  stuff from the previous owners. There is an old climbing frame and part of a horse-yard in that picture as well.

The new chicken enclosure, mostly recycled materials. Star pickets, fences, a sheet of tin and some shadecloth. There is new bird netting for part of the roof and some new chicken wire fencing to fill in gaps and keep little chicks in. The bath wasn’t popular as a nest, but the old set of lockers is brilliant.

I’d love to have a pretty new enclosure and fences where everything matched, neat nests and roosts. I’m vaguely embarrassed by this one, because so much of it looks like it should be at the tip. But I’m secretly proud of the ingenuity and that we did it ourselves.

The cropped other half to one of last week’s sunset photos. You can see our shed, wheelie bin and the power poles marching along the road.

Big girl’s collage house and unfinished fence from one of our art sessions, my cityscape is up the top.

The built environment is here to stay. It’s mostly a good thing, or at least necessary because of our choices. And even if things aren’t pretty, they have history and reasons behind them that deserves to be shown as much as the lovely trees and clouds. My children need to learn about the whole environment, then they have a chance of seeing how things fit together and interact, and thinking critically about complex decisions.

We had another couple of days without internet which is why there was no quiz posted on Tuesday. Even the trusty 3G failed so no mobile devices either. It gave me an excuse for a trawl on YouTube to find some fun and interesting videos to share instead. An easy way to finish the week.

More maths than science but this is one of the big girl’s favourites – From They Might Be Giants, Triops Has Three Eyes.

Another TMBG, I like that this one can be done as a round. And as someone who struggles every week to make things simple but keep their accuracy, this is a pretty darn good explanation of shooting stars.

Enjoyable but esoteric, I’m impressed that someone put the time in for this. Taking a set of nonsensical letters and somehow making them fit a rhythm and melody then pronouncing them must have been a challenge. It’s actually the symbols of the periodic table of elements in order.

I love any excuse for pulling out the Symphony of Science.  These are amazingly well done, pulling out significant quotes that fit and the video adds to it. It’s not something I’m good at myself, but I love seeing different and artistic ways of exploring complex things.

I didn’t start on purpose, but this is turning into a little series on how some of the things we use the most have developed and changed. So far I’ve looked at cheese and milk bottle packaging. I enjoy history and archaeology, and I think the way we use materials and the effects of social changes on our priorities is very interesting, when I put the schedule together it just happened. Today I’m going to look at the things we write on before they disappear into the past and the paperless office becomes reality.

Humans have been recording things for thousands of years – it’s part of being human to collect and pass information on, whether you think you are passing it to your relatives or the future. The first records that we can find are carved artefacts and cave paintings, but they must have been accompanied by a rich oral tradition. In order for oral cultures to work, knowledge is passed on far more formally than most of us imagine. The songs, chants and stories of traditional Aboriginal society weren’t just fun ways to pass the evening but contained a wealth of knowledge on how to survive in the area in good times and bad. The chants and social rules, along with traditional patterns, dances and drawings were directly taught mnemonics. It is possible that this type of mnemonic aid to oral systems is behind monumental architecture across the world, including Stonehenge.

At the same time, there is intriguing new evidence of symbols in cave art. Repetition of simple circles and triangles, use of symbols such as mammoth tusks, and double figures reminiscent of early pictographs seem to be common to different sites across France. It’s not epic prose, but rather the same type of reminders for oral traditions gradually becoming more like writing.

The earliest writing we know of was inventories and lists in Sumeria. This fits with the oral mnemonic idea – for relatively static and important information like the cycle of seasonal changes or animals in the area it makes sense to build a monument or a song cycle. But not for the amount of wheat you harvested this year. That type of ephemeral information is not something a large group of people need to learn and remember, so why not write it down. These early records were punched into clay with a stylus.

As records became more complicated and writing more important, something easier than clay was needed. In Egypt in the Nile delta there is a reed called papyrus. After cutting the outer rind off, the inner pith is sticky and can be cut into long thin strips. These were laid on a flat surface slightly overlapping each other. Then another set of strips were laid across the top in the other direction so there were fibres going both ways for strength. They were pressed together and hammered, then dried to form long scrolls. These worked well in a dry climate like Egypt, but in wetter Europe they soon rotted.

This is an early example of the pressure of monopolies and resource over-use. Papyrus reeds became increasingly over-harvested and scarce, eventually becoming extinct in Egypt (although they have now been re-introduced). The uncertainty of supply and reliance on a single source encouraged people to experiment with other media for recording.

A better alternative in Europe was parchment or vellum, made from sheep, goat or calf skin. They were treated differently to leather and not tanned, and they could be folded to make books rather than scrolls. They lasted far longer than papyrus and could be made anywhere. Skins contain a lot of collagen fibres and a natural glue, similar to the sticky, fibrous papyrus. They were treated in a variety of ways to allow ink to penetrate them.

Paper was invented in China around 105 AD, credited to a government official called Ts’ai Lun. He used basically the same technique you can use today, soaking finely cut rags and bark for fibres, then packing them onto a frame, pressing and drying them. It spread through imperial China, with many people experimenting with different fibres and coatings to produce paper for different purposes. As papermaking spread through Arabia and into Europe parts of the process were mechanised to make it easier and quicker.

For a long time paper was still made of old rags, but these could be difficult to come by. The Black Death ‘helped’ as it meant tons of rags and old clothes were available, right around the time printing presses became widely used. (Printing was also invented in China.) People searched for a substitute source of fibres, but the next step forward in paper production came from watching paper wasps. They chew up wood to produce their nests, and in 1843 Friedrich Gottlob Keller invented a wood grinding machine to make pulp. Only a few years later in 1854 Hugh Burgers and Charles Watt produced chemical wood pulp. Combined with the paper making machines of the industrial revolution, this allowed commercial scale paper production such as we have today.

Paper wasp by Sanjay Acharya

The paperless office was supposed to arrive a couple of decades ago, but I think we use even more now. Who knows, with mobile devices like smartphones and tablets and storage in the cloud it might actually happen. That probably won’t be the end of paper, but it will move on to different uses. Waterproof papers for packaging, smart paper to detect heat and chemicals or embedded circuits for simple disposable machines might be the future of paper.

Some bottles of food colouring were an excellent investment of about $5.50, we’re really cutting loose with them We’ve dyed eggs, used them for normal painting, marbling and now we’ve been bubble painting. In the last few weeks I’ve actually suggested it many times to have it flatly turned down, until a few days ago I just did it myself and they suddenly decided it looked ok. In fact now it’s been promoted to ‘this is the best fun evah!‘

Bubble painting is extremely easy, you just need

• a large flat container,
• water,
• detergent,
• colouring,
• a straw.

1. Put some water, food colouring and detergent in the container. You need quite a bit of colour.
2. Draw a picture with crayons on a piece of paper. We tried to match them up by drawing fish or clouds with blue or trees and caterpillars with green.
3. Use the straw to blow bubbles in the water. 
4. Carefully put the picture down on the bubbles and wait until you can see marks soaking through. 
5. Take it off to dry. It will probably have bubbles attached, this is good.

When we were doing it we discovered that bubble painting is the opposite of blowing bubbles. Here, foam is your friend. After blowing lots of big bubbles we swirled around with the straw to turn them into smaller foam, otherwise the picture ended up with lots of empty space. 

And of course this is blowing bubbles so we got to do the fun bubble stuff as well, like seeing how big we could get them.

Some close looking before swirling the foam found all sorts of interesting things, including lots of pentagonal prism bubbles and even some that looked like cubes. We had a chat about whether the sides were flat and why they weren’t like big round bubbles -

“They’re pushing from both sides so it’s flat in the middle.”

Another quick, fun way to play with different liquids and see how they interact.

A while ago I tried to make Baked Icecream with fairly dismal results, but my lovely readers came to my rescue and concluded the recipe was wrong. So using suggestions from Jamie, Veronica, Lisa, Alicia and Trinity and based on Ann’s never-fail recipe, we tried again.

First I turned the oven on to 230C so it would have time to heat properly, then we put little mounds of icecream onto gingernut biscuits and put them back in the freezer. Interestingly they were still a bit soft, if I were doing it again I’d do that hours earlier to make sure they were as cold as possible.

Using three very little egg whites and a pinch of cream of tartar we beat them until we could “turn the bowl upside down, and the egg whites stick in place.”

Then we slowly added about 2/3 of a cup of icing sugar a spoon at a time while beating.

Working quickly we tried to get the biscuits covered. It would have worked better if they were covered thickly, but they were quite fiddly – a payoff between easy making and something the girls would actually eat. And what we could get in a small town.

The girls put some extra dobs of meringue on the paper as well to make little ‘biscuits’ and use it up – we need to decrease that recipe even further. Then we popped them in the hot oven for 3 minutes, they came out up the top.

Success. While there was substantial meltage, there is still a solid blob of icecream in there. And doesn’t the meringue look pretty?

I suspect we’re seeing the problem of surface area vs volume. The icecream is cold through the volume, but is being heated across its surface area. With a small blob the surface area is relatively much larger, so it will melt more easily. It’s the opposite to the mouse’s problem of keeping warm – they generate heat across their volume but lose it through their skin, so they have to run a faster metabolism and eat relatively huge amounts to stay warm compared to an elephant.

I think we’re at the limit of what can be achieved with a ‘kiddie serve.’ To make this work better we’d need to use a larger ball of icecream and have thicker insulation, which is basically your standard Bombe Alaska. But it was certainly fun to try and satisfying to get it to work.

I thought I’d look at Easters past. Last year we made home made paper Easter baskets with seeds embedded then gave them to big girl’s school friends.

We dyed eggs with petals and cabbage. They were completely different to using food colouring.

The Easter Chicken was a collage of petals.

And the year before that we made paper mache easter baskets using water balloons.

Enjoy your holidays!

In my lifetime it’s gone through a lot of changes, it’s interesting to consider why. Obviously technology has had a lot to do with it, but social changes have also been part of it.

What does a milk container have to do?

• Be watertight.
• Allow pouring.
• Allow mass production and transport.
• Protect the milk.

Glass

Glass bottles have been produced for hundreds of years, they are chemically simple to make but take a lot of energy. Their advantage is that they are easy to clean and re-use if they are kept carefully. In the past when there was little refrigeration or private car ownership many food producers made daily deliveries. Milk companies could pick up the empty bottles on the same round so they could be washed and re-used.

With family cars and refrigeration, people started using supermarkets and buying enough to last several days. This made delivery services too expensive to compete, and made it more difficult to retrieve glass bottles. If they aren’t being re-used many times, glass bottles are too expensive and need too much energy to compare with other types of packaging.

Coated Card

Plastic coated card is simple to use for containers and easy to transport and pack. It’s light and doesn’t take up much space in landfill, however it can only be used once because it cannot be cleaned and re-sealed. In Australia this usually means it is used in smaller milk containers intended for individual serves.

Photo courtesy of Parraeel

The plastic used is petroleum based low-density polyethylene and is non-biodegradeable. They are relatively difficult to recycle, however it is becoming more common. They are soaked to separate the plastic and paper fibres. The fibres go to produce recycled paper, while the plastic is extruded into high density plastic that can be used in crates or building products.

Plastic Bottles

Plastic milk bottles have many advantages. Because they are moulded they have handles to make pouring easy and they can be re-sealed, making them practical for keeping larger amounts. They are generally made out of high-density polyethylene, and while they are only used once they are relatively easy and common to recycle.

Since milk has been kept longer it’s been discovered that UV light affects the flavour. This is why most milk cartons that are for products kept in glass fronted fridges, such as flavoured milks, are not see through. Milk that is kept in a household fridge can be in see through bottles because they are generally dark.

Packaging

All the different materials used have fulfilled the basic needs of keeping and delivering milk. However at different times the way we use milk and disposal preferences have changed, making a difference to expenses and changing the best material to use.

Have a look around your house at the different types of packaging. Can you work out why that material is used? Has it changed?

Sometimes it’s tough being the youngest. You rarely get to lead, you’re never the expert, and everyone’s done it before. And if you have the same teacher as your older siblings, you don’t even get to come home and say ‘Guess what we did!’ because they probably did it two years ago. So when the little girl dyed Easter eggs at pre-school, that became our Easter activity. It’s not as if we’re short of eggs or anything.

We’ve dyed eggs with flower petals before, but food colouring is a much brighter and more controllable colour. All you need is a splash of vinegar to make it take a bit better on the egg shell, some water and a few drops of colour plus lots of boiled eggs. We did three main activities as well as combining them – using crayons, mixing colours, and a cracked shell to try to dye the egg.

 Crayons

Crayons of course are wax based, while the food colouring is water based. So whatever you draw on the eggs resists and doesn’t get covered by the dye. I was amazed at how well the dye brought out the colours of the crayons and made them look much brighter.

Colour Mixing

I love having the opportunity to do the same thing in lots of different ways. You can mix paints, you can colour over pencils, and you can over-dye eggs. And by turning them around you can make lots of patterns too.

Cracked

When the little girl ate her egg from preschool they noticed there was some colour on the inside, and far from upsetting them they thought this was really cool.  I vaguely remembered seeing something about cracked eggs on Just Bento so we went with that.

I thought we’d have to get it out quickly to stop it just going blue all over, but in reality it would have done better with much longer to soak.

They were thrilled afterwards to see that some of the colour on all of them had soaked through, far from turning them off they were the eggs they wanted to eat.

And while we were waiting for them to soak and dry, the little girl decided to write it up. I’m not certain what inspired that – the girls don’t see me writing this but know I do it. She’s very in to telling stories from books right now, writing her own is a logical step.

She was so thrilled to have her own ‘tivity,’ that’s a huge reminder to me to make more opportunities for her to be the expert. Have you started easter activities yet?

This is something that has been on my list of possible activities literally for years. But I’ve never got to it because it feels so contrived. I mean when would you have a reason to do this? No, it’s just a fun trick, not something you’d ever actually do. Except, first watch the movie.

Now, what are at least two differences you noticed between the two eggs?

Make sure you list them before continuing …

…   …   …

Hopefully you got that

• Egg 1 spun easily Egg 2 wobbled all over the place.
• Egg 2 started spinning again after I stopped it.

What do you think could have caused that?

… (thinking time) …

Got it? No? Would you like a clue?

Egg 1 is boiled, Egg 2 is fresh.

Does that help you work it out?

…   …   …

Ok, let’s check your explanation, because you all have one, don’t you?

The Answer

Inside a boiled egg (Egg 1) is solid, but inside a raw egg (Egg 2) is liquid.

Solids keep the same shape and all move together, while liquids take on different shapes and don’t move with their container (the eggshell). It takes them time to get dragged around and once the container stops they will keep moving, like that cup of sticky juice your child slopped all over the floor.

As a solid, Egg 1 all spun together and then stopped when I stopped the eggshell. But Egg 2 took a while to get going and slopped around, and when I stopped the shell the insides kept moving, dragging the shell with them as soon as I let go.

Conclusion

I always thought of this as just a trick, but it’s actually a pretty good activity to show the differences between solids and liquids, which is huge in primary science. Plus it’s more fun than just using a bottle with water, because you can set it up as a mystery first before you pull the bottles out for everyone to play with.

And at the very least, when your 3 year old collects the eggs and can only reach one shelf which is where you happen to be storing the boiled eggs you now have a solution. I smashed a raw egg onto a chopping board yesterday, it didn’t peel easily. But the girls had fun seeing which ones would spin

Putting glue on your hand then peeling it off? That’s totally science!