Elements song by Tom Lehrer, updated

(Also posted on Facebook)

I've been working on memorizing all the chemical elements (long story) and I've always liked Tom Lehrer's classic song. It was written in 1959, though, so it doesn't include the elements discovered and named since then. There are several updated versions online that add an extra verse, but I didn't see one that rhymed! That's a major drawback in a memorization song. So I made my own update. Probably someone, somewhere, has made a rhyming one too, but I think my version works pretty well.

Here are Lehrer's original six verses, an update of his final two lines, then a new verse and new closing lines. If you're not familiar with the song, it goes to the "Modern Major-General" tune from Pirates of Penzance. (And here's a video with Lehrer singing a slightly modified version.)

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,

Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium,
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
There's strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.

There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium.

And lead, praseodymium and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

There's sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium.

These WERE the only ones of which the news had come to Harvard,
But we have to mention sixteen more that later were discovered.

There's tennessine, oganesson, meitnerium, moscovium,
And dubnium, darmstadtium, nihonium, flerovium,
[Deep breath and get ready to pack in those extra syllables]Copernicium, roentgenium, rutherfordium, livermorium,
[Now you can relax]And hassium, lawrencium, seaborgium and bohrium.

The seventh row is finished in the periodic table,
Further elements will be manmade and terribly unstable.

Continuing Education

2014 has been a good year for my education in at least three and a half ways. I want to write about them here, not to brag, but to cheer for myself moving from "kind of, sort of learning some stuff" to a more structured approach that seems to be making a difference.

1. My Spanish is getting better. Early in the year I took some community-ed Spanish classes where I had to get over my fear of trying out the language aloud in front of other students and a teacher who was a native speaker. Those have ended, but I've been using Duolingo to work on vocabulary and practice translation, and I'm starting to use some new strategies from Fluent Forever that should help even more.

2. A few months ago I got our old family accordion repaired, got some instruction books, and started practicing. My family has been very patient (accordions are loud) and I'm having a lot of fun! The weirdest thing is that while it's always been hard-to-impossible for me to memorize piano music, accordion music is much easier to memorize. Which is good, because imagine having to turn pages during an accordion performance.

3. Early this year I was introduced to Coursera, a platform for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) where you can sign up and take classes from universities all over the world for free. They're not for credit, of course, and usually not as rigorous as a regular undergraduate class, but they're a fun way to explore different subjects and get some brain exercise. Most of them run for 6 to 12 weeks, and my biggest problem has been trying not to sign up for too many at once. Here's what I've finished this year:

The Science of the Solar System (Caltech) - Serious science class with an amazing (and famous) instructor, Mike Brown (also known as Plutokiller). My second favorite so far.

Songwriting (Berklee College of Music) - This one was fun and took me way out of my comfort zone (I had to post my singing online for strangers to listen to).

Vital Signs: Understanding What the Body Is Telling Us (University of Pennsylvania) - All the things the doctor checks when you go in for a physical, explained.

Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World (University of Michigan) - I liked reading sci-fi classics like Frankenstein and Dracula, but I didn't like writing essays and trying to come up with something meaningful to say. That's one thing I don't miss about college.

Programming for Everybody (University of Michigan) - Easy introduction to the Python programming language.

Pre-Calculus (University of California, Irvine) - A great review of algebra and trigonometry and all that fun math I haven't used in years.

Fundamentals of Music Theory (University of Edinburgh) - Not the best-thought-out class (it got really difficult really fast) but it was fun to listen to the instructors.

Developing Your Musicianship (Berklee College of Music) - Some basic music theory, demonstrated by a super fun teacher who's clearly enjoying every minute, leading up to learning how to write and play a 12-bar blues.

Copyright for Educators & Librarians (Duke University and others) - Very specific topic that was actually quite interesting.

Learning How to Learn (University of California, San Diego) - Fairly good class with some good ideas about more effective studying and learning.

An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python (Rice University) - My very favorite class so far. Each week we had a game to program, getting more and more complicated and ending with an Asteroids game - here's mine. (Of course they gave us step-by-step help and provided the sounds and graphics, but still, it was really fun to write the code and get it to work correctly.)

Introduction to Guitar (Berklee College of Music) - I gave this 6-week guitar course a good effort and can now say I have tried guitar. Back to accordion for me.

Social Psychology (Wesleyan University) - Quite a good overview of this subject, with lots of video interviews of well-known psychologists and clips from famous and infamous experiments.

Think Again: How to Reason and Argue (Duke University) - Logic, fallacies, evaluating deductive and inductive arguments.

How Things Work (University of Virginia) - Basic mechanics (physics) using everyday examples. I just finished this one today.

I'm kind of amazed at how long that list has gotten, just from spending some time on classes most evenings instead of watching TV.

3.5. The half is for the Shakespeare reading. Apparently my goal of reading all the plays in one year was a little ambitious, but I'm more than half finished and still going (The Merry Wives of Windsor, currently) so I know I'll get there eventually. And then on to Dickens, I think.

Science subjects

We've just started our latest chemistry class. The older kids are using Ellen McHenry's book Carbon Chemistry, and the younger kids are doing various experiments, some the same as the older kids and some different. Yesterday everyone's favorite was mixing cornstarch and water to make what I've heard called "goo," "ooze," "plasma," or "oobleck." Last time we did this with a group, I had just bought a new tablecloth. This time I was smarter and had saved our old tablecloth specifically for this activity.

This class will run for about a month and a half, and I've been thinking about having a class for some other science subject later on in the spring. I printed out a list of different sciences and went through it yesterday with my children to see what they would be most interested in learning about. Predictably, each had a different top choice. M. wants to study psychology, A. wants to study forensics, and T. wants to study computer science. (Mike says we should cover all three at once by programming a computer to analyze criminals' thinking patterns.)

So now I need to figure out which of these three choices will work best in a group setting and which we should do on our own, and then start finding resources for them. Not just that, but all three children also want to learn about astronomy, geology, engineering, and archaeology, and there were also individual requests for genetics, environmental science, geography, botany, and nutrition.

That's what happens when you ask an open-ended question! I guess I had better get busy learning about some of these myself.

Life, lately

Well, it's November 1 and the NaNoWriMo site is overloaded, so I can't enter my first wordcount for this year's novel. (1,144 so far.) So instead I'll give a quick update on what we've been doing.

Gerbils - After a year or more of talking about getting a pet, then researching different animals, we finally got two gerbils last week from the Humane Society. I'll post photos sometime. They are friendly and very cute and should give the kids some good hands-on biology experience. (Not the breeding kind of experience, though. They are both female.)

Music - Last Friday I got to sing in the Assembly Hall in Salt Lake City with a four-stake choir for the annual Relief Society Music Festival. We rehearsed for two months with a wonderful director, and it was an amazing experience to finally perform. I was asked to play a small bell solo for one of the songs, and despite several nightmares about various ways of messing it up, it went just fine.

Chemistry - We have finished 4 out of the 6 chemistry class sessions we're holding this fall. We tried a cool color-changing experiment last week that we got from Home Science Tools. This week we will be testing for acids and bases with litmus paper and red cabbage dye. We may even bake some cakes using different chemical reactions.

NaNoWriMo - This year A. and T. are participating in the Young Writers Program, so there's a lot of writing going on in our house today.

More soon!

Blood drive, take two

After the last blood drive experience, I wasn't sure I wanted to try again. But we needed a cheap date last night, so off we went. Romantic!

I'm happy to report that this time, I didn't provide any unusual entertainment for the technicians. No gushing blood, no running for ice packs. No bruising, either! (I tried the hold-your-arm-straight-up trick, and it seems to have worked.)

I did learn one important thing, though. When they poke your finger to test your blood, and they ask whether you want them to use your right hand or your left hand, it would be smart to remember what you need those fingers for. I told them to use my left hand, thinking that I'd need it less afterward because I'm right-handed. Then today I got out my cello for some practice time. Ouch! The place they stabbed me is right where I need to push on the cello string. I got through about half my practice and had to stop. At least my lesson isn't for a few more days.

Geology

A couple of weeks ago we finished our 3-week geology class. We had 7 children participating besides my 3 kids. We looked at different rocks and minerals, used books to identify some, and even tasted one (halite, otherwise known as rock salt). We went to the Hutchings Museum where we had a wonderful personalized tour. We broke open geodes (small ones) and looked at fossils. One of the activities my kids liked was our homemade seismograph.


We got the idea from the book Geology Rocks! We used a rolling pin with paper taped around it, a cardboard box the right size to hold it, a pencil, and a nice wobbly card table. In the picture, Mike is holding the pencil steady while A. turns the rolling pin, and T. has his favorite job, shaking the card table to simulate an earthquake. Needless to say, our earthquakes went way off the Richter scale as the table-shakers got wilder and wilder.

We borrowed an amazing "Teaching Toolbox" from the Utah Museum of Natural History. It had around 20 rock samples -- big ones we could hold and examine -- along with reference books, magnifying glasses, and an activity kit we used to test minerals for conductivity. It's a great resource they offer free to teachers and homeschoolers. When it was time to return it, my kids and I stayed to see the museum, since it was a free day (free admission the first Monday of every month). It had been several years since we'd gone there.


We always have to stop outside the museum to look at the sundial.


T. likes to feed pennies to the dinosaur in the lobby and listen to it growl "THANK YOU!"


M. is getting tall -- taller than me, now -- but she's still not up to this Brontosaurus's knee.


There's a new sand and water table at the museum. My kids love to play with these forever, or at least until I tell them we have to go. I'm not sure if they're really learning much about rivers and erosion, but does it matter? They're busy, happy, and not arguing. Next time I should bring a book and let them shape their riverbeds for as long as they want.

Poetry 11

We had a star party tonight to finish off our astronomy class. It was amazing to look through telescopes and see the craters on the moon, Jupiter with three of its moons, and the far-away blur of the Andromeda galaxy. But I had just as much fun staring up into the sky and trying to pick out stars that were on my star chart. Later, after we came home and the rest of the family went to bed, I opened up A Child's Garden of Verses to find a poem I had in mind to post, and I came upon a different poem I don't remember reading before. But just look how appropriate it is after an evening of star-watching! I'll have to read it with my kids tomorrow.


Escape at Bedtime
by Robert Louis Stevenson

The lights from the parlor and kitchen shone out
    Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
And high overhead and all moving about,
    There were thousands of millions of stars.
There ne'er were such thousands of leaves on a tree,
    Nor of people in church or the park,
As the crowds of the stars that looked down upon me,
    And that glittered and winked in the dark.
The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all,
    And the star of the sailor, and Mars,
These shone in the sky, and the pail by the wall
    Would be half-full of water and stars.
They saw me at last, and they chased me with cries,
    And they soon had me packed into bed;
But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,
    And the stars going round in my head.

Sidewalk astronomy

First of all, happy National Punctuation Day!

Basic celebration technique: Use proper punctuation in all your writing today.
Next level: Read a chapter of Dickens or Austen or another 19th-century book with long sentences, paying attention to the punctuation.
Advanced: Take the quick punctuation symbol quiz at Quizicon.


Yesterday we had our first astronomy class. We talked about the solar system and how it's hard to get a sense of the distances involved when you just look at numbers. We did two activities that I highly recommend, both for scientific interest and for the jaw-drop factor!

The first one was a scale model of the earth and the moon. We followed the general outline from this site. We used a basketball for the earth, measured it and calculated the diameter, then calculated the circumference needed for the moon. It turns out that a tennis ball is about the right size. Next, I asked the kids to guess how far apart the basketball and tennis ball should be placed. They moved the balls around and made different guesses, but all were between about 1 and 5 feet. Then we did the math to figure out what the distance really should be in this scale. It comes out to about 24 feet. I had someone hold the basketball at one end of the living room, then got the tape measure and showed them how far 24 feet is -- all the way across the living room, up the stairs and back along the hallway! It's amazing when you see it represented visually. Before doing this, I had never comprehended how far away the moon really is.

The second eye-opening activity was a scale model of the solar system. There are many sites online that give instructions for this, but I used this site because it has a spreadsheet where you can put in different numbers and tweak the scale however you want. I went out early that morning and measured how long our block is (with our homemade hodometer or measuring wheel, which has been surprisingly useful over the years) and then twiddled the spreadsheet until the whole solar system fit onto our block. The spreadsheet gives you all the distances from the sun, but I also wrote down the distances from each planet to the next planet.

In the class we used a ruler marked with millimeters to draw the sun and planets in the scale we were using. The sun ended up being 50 millimeters, or almost 2 inches across. Jupiter was 5 millimeters. The earth was a tiny dot, 0.4 millimeters.

We went to the end of the block and placed the sun. (We taped our sun and planets to water bottles so they wouldn't blow away.) 7 feet from the sun was Mercury, then 6 more feet to Venus, 5 more to the earth, and 9 more to Mars. The kids were fairly impressed, but then I announced the next distance: 65 feet more to Jupiter. Wow! Now jaws were dropping. 76 to Saturn, and then an incredible 170 feet more to Uranus, 192 to Neptune, and 167 to Pluto. That took us just about to the end of our block, where we could barely see the sun at the other end.

This is an amazing activity because when you see pictures of the whole solar system, the sizes of the planets and the distances between them can't be in the same scale. It wouldn't fit in a picture. So we get the impression that those distances aren't as big as they are. Seeing our tiny dots of planets and the huge distances between them made those numbers much more real.

The spreadsheet also pointed out that in the scale we used, the distance to the nearest star (other than the sun, of course) would be 901.6 miles. That puts the solar system back into perspective as a relatively close family, far from our nearest neighbors!

I had to laugh during our activity as I realized the odd picture we made. Here were 10 kids, ages 7 to 14, marching together down the sidewalk, chanting the distance aloud as we watched the arrow on the hodometer. "63, 64, 65..." I wondered if the neighbors were thinking, "Oh, it's just those homeschooled kids, practicing their remedial math."

The blood drive report

A few weeks ago, my friend Lisa suggested a hint for preventing bruises after giving blood. (Nothing fancy, just raising your arm over your head for several minutes right after the blood is drawn.) Today there was a blood drive* at our church, and I was planning to try Lisa's strategy. Here's how it went.

Lab coat guy: (Removing needle) Keep some pressure on that and hold it up in the air. ... Okay, let's check it ... Oops, it's still bleeding. Hold it up again. ... Hmmm. It's still bleeding. ... Wow. It's bleeding a lot. ... Well, I'll just wrap the bandage really tight, and you sit here with an ice pack on your arm for ten minutes. What? Is that too tight? (No, I wasn't planning on bending my elbow or feeling my fingers for the rest of the day anyway.)

Conclusion: I think the experiment was compromised and will have to be redone. But not for a good long while.




* Giving blood isn't one of my favorite things, but the guilt** makes me do it. That's how it goes when you're type O, healthy, and haven't been out of the country in the last 3 years.


** Okay, it's not just guilt, it's also very nice to help people, and that's worth a little time and discomfort. I just wish they would come up with a Star Trek option that doesn't involve needles. "Beam out a pint, Scotty! Oh, what the heck, take two!"

Butterflies (and beans)

Here is an update on the "insects in my kitchen." A couple of months ago we sent away for caterpillars. They came in a little cup with food. There were 6 of them, very small. Over the next couple of weeks we watched them eat and get huge. Then they hung upside down and molted their skins to show the chrysalides they had formed. We put the little paper disk into our butterfly enclosure.





Here are all 6 chrysalides. You might be able to see that 3 of them are darker than the others. We were told that when they get dark, they're close to hatching.










Later that same day, those three butterflies hatched. We'd been checking periodically to see if anything was happening, but they hatched while we weren't looking. They hung for a while, getting their wings ready, then by evening they were crawling around and opening and closing their wings.








Two of the other chrysalides had started to get dark by this time.

















The next day butterflies #4 and #5 hatched. It must be a very fast process, because we were checking frequently and still missed it.














The next morning we knew the last butterfly was going to hatch. We watched as much as we could, and still missed the actual event! But we did catch this one just after it emerged. Its wings were still crumpled and wet.











We've been feeding the butterflies sugar water (on crumpled-up Kleenex, which seems to work well) and orange slices. It's hard to see in the picture (which is taken through the netting) but the butterfly on the right has put its proboscis into the orange (to sip the juice through it like a straw).




These are Painted Lady butterflies. They're easily available through science supply catalogs or from Amazon. They have been well worth the cost! It's been amazing to watch the whole process. We will be letting these butterflies go as soon as the weather warms up a little. Then my kids want to order another set of caterpillars and do it again.


Another ongoing project that is just about done is our bean plants. We wanted to see how the roots and stem develop out of a seed, and we found this idea in a book of science experiments.

You fold a paper towel so it is the height of a jar, then put it in the jar against the inside of the glass. Then you stuff the middle of the jar with more paper towels to hold the first paper towel firmly against the glass. You put the seeds around the outside of the jar, between the glass and the paper towel. (We used pole beans because they grow quickly.) Then you dampen the paper towels and wait. It took almost a week for us to see anything happening. We kept putting a little more water in when the paper towels started to dry out. Finally the roots began to emerge, and then the stems grew upward. It's been fun to watch exactly how it happens! And now we have more patience when we don't see results right away in our garden.

Visit at your own risk

There are insects in my kitchen.
The kids watch them fly.
The bacteria have started
To greatly multiply.
The bread on the counter
Is nicely growing mold.
And these jars of water stink--
It’s a good sign, I’m told.
I would surely love to have
A visit from you,
But you might want to wait
Till biology class is through!

Chicken feet

(Gross, but interesting. You have been warned.)

So I was in the grocery store yesterday buying a tray of chicken feet. (Which is now on my list of Things I Never Thought I Would Ever Do, But I Did.) I don't know which was more disturbing -- the fact that I was buying chicken feet, or the fact that nobody seemed to think it was the slightest bit unusual. The guy in front of me in the checkout line saw them, I know, but didn't stare in horror or even raise an eyebrow. The cashier rang them up as if they were a can of green beans or something. I, on the other hand, could barely stand to look at them.

I needed chicken feet for biology class. We talked about bones and muscles and tendons today, and I had read in a book that -- really, I mean it, if you don't want to read something gross, stop now! -- if you use a pair of pliers to pull the individual tendons that stick out of the chicken foot, individual toes will move. Since the class is heavy on boys and most of those boys are between 10 and 12 years old, you will see how I just couldn't pass up this experiment.

It went even better than I'd expected. If I'd only had a video camera, I could have captured the endearing scenes of the grossed-out-but-fascinated kids experimenting with different tendons, finding the one that makes all the toes move and making the feet wave at each other, and, of course, having the chicken feet fight each other.

This will be a hard activity to top.

After we cleaned up (and washed our hands and the pliers thoroughly) and class was over, I realized I still had 12 chicken feet left over. Stew? Practical jokes? Does "waste not, want not" apply in this situation? I think not. They all went in the trash. I'm sure Mike will be happy to come home and not have that package in the back of the fridge.

Science experiment vote results

Well, the kids in the chemistry class have voted and all votes have been counted. Because this is a benevolent dictatorship and not a democracy, I get to break all ties and veto any vote I don't like. (The write-in vote for "build an incendiary device" was vetoed promptly and firmly.) And I have to say I did pretty well predicting the results of the voting. Here's what we'll be doing at our last class, two weeks from now:

Playing with fire: Making lamps from paper towels and vegetable oil; producing oxygen from hydrogen peroxide and yeast and using it to make fire; lighting steel wool on fire to make molten-iron "sparklers."

Worrying the neighbors: Setting off film-canister vinegar-and-baking-soda "rockets"; dropping Mentos into bottles of Diet Coke. (Good thing the lawn is already muddy.)

Making a big mess: Testing the gel inside disposable diapers to see how much water it will hold; using soap to make pepper move on water; and, of course, making slime (from glue and borax) and "oobleck" (from cornstarch and water).

I think you'll agree that these three main categories are probably the way a lot of famous scientists got started.

The chemistry class has been a lot of fun. I hated chemistry in high school because I had a hard time understanding it and kept getting farther and farther behind. Now that I've gone through the subject on a more basic level, I understand it better and I'm amazed to find that I really like it! It's also been fun to see the enthusiasm of the kids in the class and how much fun they have with the experiments, often coming up with new things to try that I would never have thought of.

Bird show & museum

The bird show turned out to be well worth the drive! It was at the Hutchings Museum in Lehi. We'd never been there before. We spent some time looking through the museum before and after the show. I was surprised how large the museum is and how well they've used their space. There are a lot of interesting things there. T. liked the woolly mammoth tooth and using Morse code on a telegraph. The huge room full of different rocks and minerals was one of A.'s favorite parts, and M. liked the video about the Pony Express. They all loved the bird show, which was funny and informative -- the best combination.



Here's a gyrfalcon, with a little kestrel sitting on the glass case behind it.




And the one we especially came to see -- a peregrine falcon. The man who's holding it said when he read My Side of the Mountain in third grade, he knew he wanted to work with falcons. Now he's the head of an organization that breeds falcons and helps rehabilitate injured ones, and he gets to go around teaching other people about them too. I wonder how many other falconers got their inspiration from the same book. Probably a lot!

And this is a golden eagle -- a young male, only 8 pounds. They said they would have brought a female (20 pounds), but then they wouldn't have been able to fit the other birds in the van.

We also got to see a goshawk, a Harris hawk, a screech owl and a great horned owl. Even T. stayed interested for the whole hour, and he's not one to sit still for most things!

Chemistry class

We had chemistry class this week. There are 7 students: my 3 kids and 4 other homeschooled kids who come. I aimed the class at a junior-high-school level since my two oldest are 13 and 10, but my 6-year-old participates too, because it's easier to let him be there than to find someone else's house for him to go to. The only part of the class he doesn't like is waiting his turn to do the experiments.

This week we learned about plastics and polymers. We made slime to play with. We tested two kinds of plastic containers to see what boiling water would do to them. (Water bottles that say "1" on the bottom do not hold up well to boiling water.) We filled sandwich baggies with water, closed them up, then stuck sharpened pencils right through them. They don't leak because of the polymers they're made of. (Well, when you pull the pencils out they leak. So do it over the sink.)

We have two classes left, and for the last class I'm going to let the kids decide which experiments they want to do again -- kind of a "greatest hits" list. Here are my predictions for what they'll choose:

Dropping Mentos into Diet Coke to make geysers.
Setting fire to steel wool to make sparklers.
Making rockets out of film canisters, baking soda and vinegar.
Making slime.
Melting Styrofoam with acetone.
Making sparks and flames with hydrogen peroxide and yeast.

The kids will vote at our next class, January 14. I'll be interested to see how close my predictions are!

My morning as a lab technician

I helped today with a salsa-canning assignment at Welfare Square (an LDS Church facility in downtown Salt Lake where they prepare food to give to the needy). About 15 people showed up in the morning to help. We all put on our hairnets and gloves and the supervisors started pointing out where each person would be working. Some were put to work weighing ingredients or pouring them into big vats to be mixed. Some sat at the assembly line to check and label the jars. Finally another lady and I were asked to follow one of the supervisors. He took us through a door and we found ourselves in a little science lab. Our job was to test a jar from each batch of salsa, going through a checklist of tests and measurements and documenting everything carefully. What a fun assignment!

Here's what we had to document:
1. Date and time.
2. The lot number (marked on the jar).
3. Weight of the unopened jar.
4. The amount of vacuum inside the sealed jar. There was a neat little device that punctured the top and measured the vacuum on a dial.
5. The head space between the top of the jar and the salsa. Another device fit over the top of the open jar and we swung part of it down to measure the distance to the salsa.
6. "Soluble solids." The supervisor said this basically meant sugars. We processed some salsa in a blender, then put a spoonful into a testing device that gave a readout.
7. The pH. There were probes that we lowered into some of the blended salsa to get this reading.
8. The consistency. We had a metal contraption that was like a ramp with lines marked across it, and at the top of the ramp was a spring-release gate. We filled the space behind the gate with salsa, then released the gate and measured how far the salsa would run down the ramp in 30 seconds.
9. "Defects." This test was just spreading some of the salsa out in the bottom of the sink and looking through it to see if there was anything in it that shouldn't have been. No plastic, cardboard, or mysterious objects were found.
10. Color.
11. Taste. I don't like salsa, but luckily, the other lady did, so she did all the tasting. I told them I will be happy to go back on chocolate-tasting day, though.

Then we rinsed everything off and started again with the next jar.

I wasn't surprised that the kids were jealous when I came home and told them about my morning! Next time I volunteer I'll probably be cleaning floors or something, but this was a great assignment for my first time there, and a good warmup for our chemistry class this afternoon.