This summer our church has been having a Patch the Pirate Music/Drama club. In the past, we had focused our efforts on VBS, but we decided to try something different this year because our church is out in the country, and we thought if we offered something a little more unique, it might draw in more kids from the surrounding area. The Lord led us to the Patch the Pirate clubs, and it has been a wonderful experience. A lot of work, but a wonderful experience. And, we have had a great group of kids!
I will post more about our club in a future post, but for this entry, I wanted to write about the puppet portion that the Prairie Family kids have been doing. It has been quite a jump from our simple VBS puppet presentations to what we are doing this year! The kids have been performing the Patch the Pirate musical entitled Incrediworld. This has taken a lot of imagination for costuming and covering all of the parts with puppets, but the kids have been very diligent to work on it each day, and the kids who are coming to our club are enjoying the puppet presentations.
Our puppet rehearsals can get pretty silly at times. These are two video clips of the kids rehearsing. The first one is a more “serious” portion of the program where the granny puppet is explaining the Gospel. The second clip features Brock as Behemoth the Dinosaur. Something magical happens to Brock when he puts on that crazy dino puppet. It is quite a sight to see!
Of course, the kids use puppet stages for the actual performances. Brock’s dinosaur has a silly dance that he made up to another song. I am trying to talk him into letting me get a video of that, and if he agrees, I’ll post that in a future entry!
John’s 10th Grade Science project was rather complicated, but the results ended up being quite interesting! For this investigation, John was testing how feeding worms a variety of different materials affected the nutritious qualities of the soil.
This project involved a long process of feeding worms in different buckets different foods: crushed leaves, crushed egg shell, “worm chow” (a product used in raising composting worms), and a combination of the three foods. John sent in initial samples of the soils to get a baseline measurement before beginning his procedure. Then every day the worms were fed or watered, and observations were made of each bucket. After several weeks of this, we had the wonderful job of sifting through the dirt to sort out the worms to count and weigh, and then we took the various soils and sent them back into a soil lab to have the nutrients retested.
Of course, several obstacles appeared during the course of this project. John started the experiment with the buckets in our basement, but that soon led to rather unpleasant issues. First, mold grew in some of the buckets, which wasn’t very helpful for my allergies! That was tolerable, however, compared to the little critters that started hatching from the buckets! Yes, we quickly learned that God has nature pretty well balanced, and it is not easy to replicate His natural balances in a “controlled” setting! LOL! I had no idea how delicate the balance of food, water, and worms is to the presence of mold and grossness! 🙂 Anyway, we changed course half-way through the experiment and moved the buckets to the garage where the winter temperatures took care of the bug and mold issues but left the worms to do their thing. So, we didn’t follow our planned procedures exactly, but practicality and health safety issues do come into play sometimes!
It was interesting when we took the soil out of the various buckets. For each bucket with worms, there was a control bucket without worms. The buckets without worms had very compact soil that kind of just fell out like sand castles. The buckets with worms, however, had much looser soil. It was also notable that even though each bucket began with 150 worms, they all ended up around 40-50 worms each. After discussing possible reasons, we wonder if maybe that has more to do with the size of the buckets rather than what we were feeding the worms. I guess that would make another good investigation someday (if we ever decide to tackle worms again!)
So, the soil samples were sent to a soils lab for analysis, and there were lots of mixed results. That’s another thing that’s complicated about doing experiments with living creatures: it’s hard to really isolate what is going on without a multitude of trials because of the complexity involved in just being alive! There was one very clear result in all of the buckets, though. In every case, the presence of earthworms dramatically improved the nitrogen levels in the soil.
So, what did we really learn from this project? Mostly that God really does have a mighty hand on His creation. He knows exactly what is needed for life to exist and to flourish–that includes human, animal, and plant life. Even simple little creatures that we rarely think about like earthworms play an important role in the whole of nature. I would suspect that our world would be very different without these little critters–perhaps life might not even be possible without them. We truly have an amazing Creator who deserves our heart-felt praise.
“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.” Psalm 19:1-3
Today I was browsing on the internet and came across this picture of Saturn that reminded me of these verses. This picture taken by the Cassini probe clearly shows a double hexagonal formation (one inside of the other) directly above the north pole of Saturn. The Voyager probes also documented this formation in the 1980’s, but these newer images are much clearer. But because of the earlier documentation, we know that this is a long-term formation on Saturn.
“We haven’t seen a (geometric) feature like this anywhere else on any other planet,” said Cassini scientist Kevin Baines of the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It’s unbelievable.”
“It’s perplexing,” said Baines. “It’s a bizarre pattern.”
This hexagon appears to be some kind of atmospheric pattern. It has 6 nearly straight sides and is nearly 15,000 miles across–nearly large enough for 4 Earths to fit inside of it. It extends about 60 miles down into the clouds of Saturn.
What is really neat is that at the opposite pole of Saturn lies another beautiful feature:
This photo,also taken by the Cassini probe, shows a very distinctive hurricane-like storm on Saturn’s south pole. This storm appears to have winds of 350 mph and is locked into place around the pole.
Scientists are trying to figure out why these features are there, but the answer is really simple: God put them there! The heavens shout His creative mind and power, and I praise the Creator for the beauty that He made in the universe!
My kids absolutely LOVE the Jonathan Park radio drama series. It is a Christian adventure series that incorporates a lot of neat science information. The website is http://www.jonathanpark.com .We own the whole series, and can’t wait for the next installment to be released. The kids listen to it every night before bed, and have almost memorized most of the episodes!
The latest fad among the kids is making up their own Jonathan Park stories and acting them out. Sometimes this gets pretty crazy, but overall, it’s pretty funny to watch! (I mean, really, how many times in a row can they forget to change the radio frequency so Myles Morgan can’t intercept their messages!) Sometimes I even hear them put in the little commercial that the radio series does in the middle of the episodes!
Anyway, we put together a Smilebox slideshow of their story, and I am also going to post a video clip of them explaining what they are doing.
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The Prairie Family Chronicles 