Busy, Busy, Busy

Whew, today was pretty crazy. But kind of in a good way.

The kids were chatterboxes, and they knew it too. After school, one 6th grader said to me, "Miss H, tomorrow we'll be better."

We made our parent Christmas presents today.  I melted the candle wax I'd found in the cupboard. While it was melting, they used the beeswax sheets to roll candles.  Some of the bottoms weren't very flat, so they dipped the ends in the melted wax.  They turned out pretty neat!  Some used little pieces of wax to make decorations for the outside. ...I let them get out the glitter too... and as expected, glitter exploded.  But, my students are responsible for their actions; they cleaned it up. And vacuumed even!

Making the candles took most of the morning. All we need to do is decorate the outsides of the jars and wrap them.  Even with all the candle-making, we had time for two rounds. They were noisy until I said the next person who talked got 5 sentences, then 6, then 7, etc. They were quiet as a church mice after that!

We finished our read aloud book today.  I'm not sure if I should start reading another book since we only have three days left this week, or if I should wait until after Christmas.  They might forget the story between now and then.  Or I could read a shorter book.  Or short stories.  I suppose I can ask them what they think.

The 7th and 8th graders had a lab today too.  Mr. E watched the kids at noon recess so I'd have time to set up the lab.  I'm glad he did! It took a while to cleanup the candle mess and put out the supplies for DNA extraction.  Yes, you read that right. The 7th and 8th graders extracted DNA from wheat germ and strawberries today.  They were really into it!

I tested out the experiment over the weekend, but couldn't get it to work.  I did some more research and found that to get better results I could 1) use ethyl alcohol instead of rubbing alcohol, 2) freeze the alcohol for at least two hours (or overnight), 3) add meat tenderizer to keep the DNA strands together.  Every group got it to work today!  We weren't able to lift much of it out of the test tubes, but it was clearly precipitating out of the solution.  Even the groups that thought they messed up were able to see the DNA.  It was pretty cool.  Some girls wanted to know if oranges would have lots of DNA or other fruits.  If we have time some day, we might test it out!  We were supposed to look at the DNA under a microscope, but we ran out of time.  Save that for another day too!

Weekend update: I did make it down to Truman for Christmas celebrations.  I stayed longer than expected due to the cold weather, but my travels were safe!  The Christmas program went very well Sunday night... only a few mistakes, and they were ones most people didn't notice.  The kids enunciated their parts clearly and slowly too.  We took the day off from program practice, but we'll practice twice more this week, just to keep their parts fresh in their heads.  Round Two is Saturday night, Christmas Eve at 6:00pm.