Science Project Time!!

Yep, that time again. Some parents dread the approach of this annual conundrum---what will my project be about? Hmmmmm.

Well, here at the Jones house, that's not an issue. We have questions spewing forth all the time. I can't take credit for this, Heavenly Father sent them that way and I'm thankful for it. Maybe this is some small payment for my efforts to always answer "Why?" when it came around all those millions of times when they were younger. I don't know, but I love it.

We'll start at the top, shall we:

This year Bethany knew in her gut she wanted to do something with crystals. She vacillated a great deal about what exactly she would do with them, but as I said before, we're good at the questions. She decided that she had to know whether or not you could predict the amount of crystals inside a geode by weight. Several bags of geodes, old socks smacked to shreds and a food scale later, she found out that you could indeed predict the crystal amount by weight, but opposite of what she had expected; she had thought the heavier the geode, the greater the amount of crystals inside. It's backwards from that. We did have a blast bashing away at geodes in old socks though. Geodes are formed--it turns out---by small water particles that get into the rock. Over time the water evaporates and leaves the residue that begins the crystal formation, and of course, there are spaces void of anything inside really loaded geodes, so thus they weigh less. "Light Bulb!" as Gru would say. :) I was blown away by Bethany's thought process and logical arrangement of her information and findings, it truly was a beautiful science project and she won 2nd place overall. Way to go Bethany!!

Lindsay went from wanting to build Creamy---our pet gerbil---ten different mazes to see which one he could get through the fastest, EEEEEEK!!!!, to a much more accomplishable scenario just using the one maze we have built for him---or should I say that Brandon built for him, have I mentioned before how amazing Brandon is? Anyway, the question evolved into 2 parts: Can Creamy Learn the Maze? and Can Creamy remember the route over time? The answer was yes on both counts. Lindsay did the tests over the space of 3 days. Each time he went through he got faster to a point---at said point he got bored and sidetracked. That was actually pretty funny to see each day. Who would have thought? The third day he had shaved something like 20 seconds from his original time and went through the maze in 9 seconds! It was pretty cool!! Lindsay won 3rd place for 2nd grade behind her buddies Josh and Sam, so she was pretty excited about that! Way to go Lindsay!!!!

Jeremy was a piece of work this year, but in the end, it got done and he was proud of his 4th place. It was all about magnets and he wanted to know if size was an indicator of how strong a magnet was. We had a drawer full of different ones, plus several that were on the fridge and some from Jeremy's Magnetix set that he found under the Christmas tree. It turns out, wonder of wonders, that the tiny industrial mag that I don't even know the origin of was the strongest by far. We tested them by seeing how many sheets of computer paper they could hold to the fridge before they slid off. I have found that with boys, the experiment is AWESOME, but the write-up is pure torture. Oh well, we made it through and he was so proud of the ribbon. Way to go Jeremy!

I love science!!