Show & Tell: Adventures Week 18

Today we wrapped up Week 18 of Adventures in My Father's World.

In Bible, we looked at Jesus as the Lamb of God.  We read from John 1 where John the Baptist refers to Jesus as the Lamb of God, and tied that in to Exodus 12 where the Israelites are preparing to leave Egypt during the first Passover.  The point was that the Jews would have had a good idea of what John the Baptist was saying when he referred to Jesus as the Lamb of God.  Because they had been celebrating the Passover Feast for so many years, they would have made the connection that a lamb saves.

In history, we spent the first three days learning about Eli Whitney and the cotton gin.  In order to have a better appreciation of the cotton gin, we spent one evening picking seeds out of some cotton.

The first step was to make some "cotton seeds" out of construction paper and glue them onto our cotton.

By the time we were done, our cotton was full of seeds!  But it would have been too easy to pick them out like this!

So I balled the cotton up to make it look a little more like it does when it grows on a plant.

The girls worked and worked ...

... and picked and picked ...

... and finally got all the seeds out, but they pulled out a lot of cotton, too!

After this, they had a new appreciation for Eli Whitney's cotton gin!  Here's the notebook page Hannah made for her U.S. Notebook:

Toward the end of the week, we learned that Tennessee was the next state to be added to the union.  The girls immediately remembered going to the water park in Tennessee with Uncle Clark's family, so they felt like they had a personal connection with this state.  :)

In science, we discussed the difference between living and non-living things.  We read through the creation account and categorized everything God created as either living or non-living.  Then we took a look at the most basic component of all living things:  the cell.  The girls watched a DVD called The Newtons' Workshop:  The Cell-a-bration, which I highly, highly recommend, and they built a couple of cell models out of jello.


This was our edible cell model.  :)  The green jello represented the cytoplasm, the banana represented the nucleus, and the mandarin orange slices and raisins represented the organelles.  And yes, it was delicious!



Although we technically could have eaten this one, it sure wouldn't have tasted very good!  I just wanted to do a model out of clear gelatin so the girls could see the different parts a little better.

Once we began talking about cells, we discussed how microscopes help us see things like bacteria that are too small to be seen with the naked eye.  We did an experiment to see if bacteria grows faster in a cold environment or a warm environment.

We placed one jar of milk on the windowsill in the kitchen ...

... and an identical jar in the refrigerator.

Five days later, this is what they looked like.  Hannah remembered this project and thought we had made butter!  But I took the lid off, and one quick whiff told her it wasn't butter at all!  (Or at least if it was butter, she wasn't having any of it!)

 Glad we made it through this little project with no incidents!  If you remember, we've had our share of milk woes around here!  :)