I thought this was a great picture of Christian demonstrating the crystal radio we finished building last Friday while Kelly was off at her friend Skyler’s birthday party.
We got the kit from The Xtal Set Society. The radio worked great. We had to hook it to the tubing coming out of the hot water heater for a ground and a long extension cord that we ran out into the yard for an antenna, but we got a very strong signal from a local AM radio station. Very impressive. This is actually the second crystal radio we have built. The first one was one of the ones that uses a coil wrapped around a toilet paper tube for tuning. This kit was really more of a soldering lesson than a crystal radio lesson, but it went great. I showed Christian how to solder a part and then handled a couple of the harder joints for him, but he soldered most of it by himself. He read the instructions, populated the board, trimmed the leads, and all that other stuff, too. What a great product. We had such a good time, we have purchased an AM/FM radio kit from another company that is quite a bit more complicated. We are going to put it together this summer.
The year is starting to wind down a little now. Kelly finished her last advanced fifth grade set of books from Singapore Math. We decided to go on ahead to the first of two advanced sixth grade math book sets. The first exercises start dealing with algebra, so that is very exciting. Both of the kids are well into their five page research reports. Kelly is working on a report on newspapers and writing while Christian is doing a history of flight. They are finishing up a session of swimming lessons next week and will start their fourth and final one month lesson for the year right after that.
I bought the kids some modeling clay to use for our claymation project over the summer. After seeing how well the kids are doing on this, I think I will stick to being the technical advisor.