Friday, September 4, 2009

Pinch Pots and Cheek cells

Matthew and Jonathan started their new clay class today. It came recommended by Linda and her son Ian takes the more advanced wheel class so of course, they wanted to do it too (and hopefully catch up with Ian quickly). Today they started out with the most basic of things, the pinch pot. I couldn't get many details out of them (this is the disadvantage of boys) except that they had fun and are looking forward to making coil dishes next week. I have to drop them off on the way to Nico's zoo class so I'm unable to stay generally but next week we have a break between sessions for Nico so I'll be heading over with my camera to check it out.

Nico had a fun class learning about Aye-Ayes and even got to pet a 2yr old Alligator named Tabasco. Very cool but sort of creepy at the same time.

Christopher and Ian are studying skin, hair, and teeth this week so the lab involved preparing cheek cells and looking at them under a microscope and drawing what they saw and then labeling the parts of the cell. It took several tries for them to prepare one good slide as they kept not scraping hard enough and kept knocking the slides and making a mess and having to start over. But we finally got a good sample from Linda's cheek and were able to view it at 40X and the boys both got nice drawings of the cell with all it's parts. I was so pleased when Christopher was able to label the whole thing without referring back to anything. Again, I plan to get pictures of them working in lab next week. It's really cool to see them, one at a microscope and the other preparing a slide or doing some research on the computer. Well, when we can get them both to work at the same time. I tend to set Ian off into a giggling fit and Christopher is easily distracted by their cats. Hopefully with a few more weeks together, those will stop and the labs won't take quite so long.

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