Pinnacles Trip

El Dia de los Muertos

Chalk Drawings

Ellie Art

Rain

Shadow The Lamp Makes on Ceiling

Two People Hugging

A View from Ellie's Bed

On the floor below the bed on the bottom left is a mirror in blue, flashlight, piece of candy and bottle.

Hoi An

Hue & Family

Hong Kong

Creative Architecture

Just documenting some of the very interesting ways that the girls create structures for their dolls and other figures to reside in.

Hiking Near Chabot Science Center

Took the girls hiking around Joaquin Miller Park which provided some fun exploration deep in the forest on relatively easy trails.  Too bad there were alot of mountain bikes there as well.

Electronics

I've been trying to think of ways to get the girls interested in electronics because 1. Its relatively safe. 2. Favors individuals with small hands 3. Is the foundation of all electronic devices we use in all shapes and forms 4. Is the foundation for logic, physics AND computer programming.

I started by hooking up batteries to LEDs and throwing resistors in there to see how the brightness changed.  Explored series and parallel  Replaced the LEDs with speakers. etc.  Next I bought a solar cell and hooked it up to a multimeter to try to show the girls how the voltage numbers change depending on the amount of light hitting the cell.  This was a little abstract so I went back to connecting the cell up to LEDs and speakers which is a little more tangible.

The girls also really liked switches and they are useful to throw into every circuit.  Switching the device off and on gives them more hands on feeling and allows them to look a little more closely at the circuit being made.

In this picture Ellie is sorting the green and yellow wires into appropriate buckets.  She really liked doing that.

Blueprints

Ellie's creativity is amazing.  After hot glue gunning some furniture, Ellie had a long list of new things that she wanted to build.  I told her to write it down and she drew the following blueprints.  Items consist of chairs, tables, toilet bowl, sink, bathtub, bookshelf etc.

Hot Glue Gun

The Exploratorium is a really inspiring place for creativity.  In this project I used cardboard from Amazon shipping boxes and a fresh new hot glue gun to make a few different buildings an pieces of furniture etc.

Sound Science

In this experiment I downloaded a "Sound Spectrum Analyzer" from the iTunes store on my iPhone.  I then explored how increasing the amount of water in a glass decreased the frequency of the sound in a measurable way.