Science and art presentations

Last week the girls had to give presentations on their science and art projects for our homeschool coop. For science, we worked together to build a cardboard box solar cooker.  Here are the directions for the cooker that we built. We took pictures as we assembled it and tested it out on a sunny day on our back deck.

Gluing foil to the inside of 2 boxes.

Here's a picture of the big box with a whole cut into the top and crumpled newspaper in the bottom.

This is the oven all assembled and cooking on the deck. Just as the oven got up to 200 degrees we put a pot of chocolate, peanuts, and raisins inside. The hottest it got was 215 degrees.

We checked on it in an hour and it was nice and soft.

The girls wanted to be able to serve their chocolate treats to the class so they spooned it out on wax paper, put sprinkles on top and let them cool.

As you know you can melt chocolate outside on most sunny days in Columbia. I used this recipe because it was quick and easy and fun for the kids. I did some research and found that a typical slow cooker cooks at 200 degrees on its lowest setting. Later in the week I put a pot of lentils out in the oven and left them there all day. Yes, the lentils were cooked when I got them out in the evening!


In addition to the science presentation, the girls also had to choose 2 pieces of art that they worked on during the year and present them to the class.

Here is Ellen showing her acrylic sunflowers painting she made after studying Van Gogh.

Here is Arianna showing off her tree that she painted using textured paints.

This shows another student giving her presentation. You can see that the group is a variety of ages from preschool to high school--about 20 students in all.