It was one of the hottest weekends on record for our area and it was rough having to be outside with no AC for 4 days straight. We also camped out for the weekend but thankfully temperatures cooled off quite a bit overnight.
And there comes the educational part. We learned that goats that are upset sound a lot like someone screaming, especially at 1am. And we learned that roosters start crowing around 4am in the summer.
But despite the lack of sleep the first night, overall we had a really good weekend.
Our club won Best in Show for our display. Each of the kids filled out a rocket with what STEM topic they enjoyed doing this year, one they would like to do, or a STEM career they were interested in.
We also won an Honorary Mention for our club banner. Each of the kids decorated a square with a STEM symbol.
And we won Best Dressed for our lab coats and goggles that we wore for the parade of clubs.
I made the kids do entries for Fair (and called them school!). George chose to enter some of his comic strips, and was awarded a "Very Good" ribbon ....
and Vicki entered a science poster about Trilobites. She has been fascinated with Trilobite Cousins since I rehung our Charlie's Playhouse prehistory timeline recently. Since she was still a Cloverbud for this years fair, she received a rainbow participation ribbon. She joined in for Cloverbud graduation during the fair.
The kids were both very excited about their awards and are already planning to do more entries for next year. We will be joining the dog training club to work with Andy and one of them will select that as one of their projects.
I'm also going to have one of them do a project involving Galactica (who came to fair with us and was a big hit).
Our club ran a few activities at the fair. We blew up balloons using vinegar and baking soda - 2/3 cup of vinegar and 1 tbsp. of baking soda gave a decent size balloon. We put the baking soda into the balloons using a funnel, placed the neck of the balloon over a water bottle with the vinegar inside, then dumped the baking soda in by picking up the balloon.
We ended up stopping this after the first couple of days because it was a lot of work cleaning out the bottles in between, and wasn't really that impressive.
Our other activity was shooting off Alka Seltzer rockets. We found that Alka Seltzer cold tablets make the water orange and actually look really cool because you can see the foaming. We also found that 1/4 of a tablet in a film canister filled only 1/3-1/2 with water worked the best. The longer the reaction took, the higher our rockets shot. We had some hitting the ceiling of the tent - about 30 feet up!
Vickis 9th birthday was during the fair, so we had cake with some of her friends....
and Squidy managed to avoid being in many pictures. :-)
