This week we continued to talk about soil, civilizations, and land formations. In Bible we talked about Jesus talking with the disciples about counting the costs of something before beginning an activity, and we also talked about being a light set on a hill rather than down in the valley, and how we can see for miles around from a hill instead of being unable to see and defend ourselves in the valley as well.
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| I gave them small cubes to build two circular towers. One set of cubes was only 20, the other 200. |
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| She decided that it obviously pays off to count the costs and be sure we have the materials and abilities required before we begin a project! |
Along with counting the costs, we talked a bit about stewardship and the need to have our money set aside for tithe, spend, and save. We made little "piggy banks" out of dixie cups (my kids don't get a whole lot of money!).
Since we have been talking about soil and its components, we got a jar of water and added a good large scoop of the soil from our garden in the front yard. We shook it up until there were no more lumps visible, and left it to settle into the different layers of soil. It took a good 24 hours to get the layer of silt to settle in, but the sand layer was visible almost immediately, and the clay layer about 2 hours later.
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| In this picture you can see the sand layer having already settled at the bottom. |
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| This picture shows sand on the bottom and then a good thick layer of clay-- I always suspected we had a very clay-based soil in our garden considering how wet it stays and for how long! |
We also have discussed the need and uses for electricity, and so we went to take a look at where we get our power from. Our power is supplied mainly by a nuclear power plant, which is about 20 miles from our house, but takes nearly an hour to reach due to rivers and such being in the way! We wanted to go see both sides of the plant, but couldn't figure out how to get to the other side. We are thinking they must have had the access blocked off for some reason, so we just went to a spot where we could see one of the domes and the distribution center of the plant from the road, and called it good. We'll look at some pictures of the plant online in the coming week.
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| The control buildings and one of the domes are visible in the center/left of this photo, and some of the distribution equipment to the right. |
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| Distribution equipment |
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| Results! Sand on the bottom (yellowish), clay in the middle (brown), and silt on top (grey). There was also a very small amount of humus left floating around on the very top. |
We have also been waiting on the tomato and pepper plants that we started on Sunday to sprout, the tomato plants started sprouting yesterday, hopefully the pepper plants will sprout by next weekend, though I always find those quite difficult to coax into growing. We also plan to plant the garden in the coming week or so!
