Inventions, Experiments And A LIttle Bit Of Plumbing

I feel like life has slowed down long enough for us to just "be" for a little while and it's been wonderful. There's been a lot of creativity and learning going on. Dominick came home from Home Depot the other day with an itch to build something. He wanted to build something out of PVC pipe but couldn't think of anything so he sat down at the table with a pen and paper and decided to invent something instead.  He came up with two ideas. One was a redesigned screw with a head that the screwdriver locks into to prevent stripping

 This was his design. On the right is the screw head and on the left is the drill bit.

The second was an smart phone case with a small compartment for a credit card or money. He made a prototype out of Legos (of course!)

And when the delivery guys who installed my washer broke a pipe, he finally had something to build with  PVC pipe too.

 Leaky pipe fixed!
(I got to clean up all the nastiness behind the washer)

Then we had some more late night science. Apparently science only happens after 9 p.m. at our house.We got this science kit at a garage sale a few months ago and Aravis wanted to try some of the experiments.

 We learned about the primary colors of light, red, green and blue. We also learned about color addition and subtraction and why we see the colors we see. We did this experiment to see how a beam of light travels.

We went into a dark room with a flashlight. Then we sprinkled some baby powder in front of the flashlight to see the beam of light. It was pretty cool. The light pushed the baby powder forward in the straight line you see here. 

Reorganizing the K'Nex for packing led to LOTS of K'Nex building. (Dominick is building as I type)

Xury and her toys loved the carnival.

   

And Aravis had lots of fun with sidewalk chalk and water.