Sunny science!

On Thursday K popped in to Pizza Express (on her own, which I was quite surprised about) and asked them if she could possibly have an empty pizza box for a science experiment and they kindly obliged.  After some preparation, which involved painting the bottom of the box black and covering the inside of the lid in aluminium foil, yesterday we tried it out with some marshmallows (and a grape, which M added later).

Our solar oven.

We didn't put it out until about 12.30pm and had problems keeping the lid at a good angle, plus it was rather cloudier than it has been recently.  Consequently it didn't work particularly well, although it was clearly quite hot in there!

Temperature to start with.

Temperature about half an hour later.

I don't think it ever got much hotter than that, but it wasn't consistent because of the clouds.  Anyway, we tried again today and got it started earlier, about 11.30am and although it was, again, quite overcast at times, when the sun was out it was really hot.  After about 4 hours or so, we got the marshmallows out, although to look at the oven didn't seem to have had much effect. 

A rather squidgy solar oven-cooked marshmallow.

K enjoying hers!

Yesterday we went for play and tea with friends across the road, which was fun.  M in particular is getting increasingly frustrated at our thwarted attempts to meet up or plan to meet up with friends now that the schools have broken up.  So many of them seem to have planned out the whole six weeks more or less either through necessity for child-care issues or desire to do so. 

One of the things that K & M love to do with these friends is dressing up, as they've got lots mostly from J's (that's the mum) childhood, she did ballet until her late teens and has the costumes from the shows she was in, as well as other things too.  K in particular likes it because there are things that fit her, which given her height is now quite rare.

K dressing up.

In other news, there's been quite a lot of piano practice and playing going on, mostly from K but some from M too and a bit of French horn, although it's more effort to get her horn out, put the music stand up and so on than to just plonk herself down at the piano, which particularly at the moment in this heat is an issue.  We've also been continuing with Ruby Redfort and K has finished the multiplication and division workbook that she has been working through on her own (it has the answers in the back, so she checks them herself when she has done each exercise), she rather reluctantly let me have a look at it once she'd completed it.