Science Fair

As a parent I often feel that my children's homework is really work sent home as busy work for me. I can handle the weekly spelling lists and silly work that comes along with those lists. The math sometimes gives me a little extra stress. Mainly because I learned how to do math one way and now a days kids learn the same stuff a completely different way. Drives me crazy! Borrowing is now called regrouping. So when I tell my 2nd grader to borrow from a number during subtraction he has no clue what the heck I'm talking about. Makes for much frustration and many tears shed.
I have a love/hate relationship with science fair projects. I hate all the work and effort and time they take. But, I love when they're done. This year I had 2 kids doing  projects. Kenzie had to do a 7th grade project and Xander had to do a 5th grade project. And guess what, they couldn't be on a 2nd grade level.
Kenzie chose her own project and submitted it without me even knowing she had to do one.
She chose to see what foods conduct the most electricity. She used different foods such as: potatoes, red and green apples, lemons and oranges.

She and Tyler did most of her project. I just helped with the poster at the end.

She used a watt reader thingy to test each food.

Kenzie informed me, my job was to make it pretty.

So, that's what I did. 

Let me tell you, she better appreciate it cause she left it to do till the night before.

This is what my work looks like at 4:30am. 

Xander's project was more on my level. He decided to test the 5 second rule. He wanted to know if food left for 5 seconds on a floor really got that dirty or contaminated.
I ordered petri dishes online and away we went growing our own bacteria in our little homemade incubator.
First we used a control and then we dropped a piece of bread on the floor for 5 seconds. Then we got a new piece of bread and dropped it for 15 seconds, 30sec, 45 sec, and then a minute. After each timed drop we swabbed the bread and rubbed it in a petri dish. We repeated this process with a new slice of bread with each of the designated times.

Supplies for Xander's experiment

Timing the bread.

Swabbing the bread and petri dish.

Once the breads were all swabbed and the petri dishes sealed we placed them in our little incubator.

A simple plastic tote with a clip lamp attached.

We let the petri dishes bake for a few days and documented their growth.

After 2 days, this is what we had. 

Nasty!

Yes that would be bacteria. After only 5 seconds.

However, just cause his petri dish looked nasty doesn't mean his project board needed to look sloppy. That's where mommy takes a little over. Ok. a lot.

This is scrapbook paper at it's finest.

 Thank goodness we are done with science fair projects for another year.