We have spent the last week working on a dollhouse sized castle that is powered by clean and renewable energy. We had to learn how to use different types of energy sources to power lights and fans as well as work out a way to pump water in. Below is a video and explanation from Luna of our castle. Luna: The wiring to the battery is powering the light that's in the fireplace and then there's the light ball lighting up the TV that is powered by the lemon batteries. Jodi: H

Yesterday we went to a town called Glen Rose and visited a state park called Dinosaur Valley State Park. The reason it is called that is because as you can see in the picture below there are fossilized Dino footprints there. These prints were made in what is now a river. The prints were made by the footprints being filled with another type of soil which hardened the print below. Over time, the new soil eroded by wind and water leaving a hardened footprint beneath. I thin

In 1901 the Texas Oil Boom began when a lot of oil was discovered in Texas. Cities like Houston and Dallas grew because they had railroads that could ship the oil and were not too far from where oil was being drilled. Galveston got smaller because all the hurricanes made it a less reliable place to ship from. Texas benefited from the discovery of oil by having money that was available and donated to the building of universities, hospitals, scientific research, public educa

We went to visit the Stockyards in Fort Worth and learned that is was referred to as the Wall Street of the West because there was a time that it was where the most money in the west was made because of the cattle. After the Civil War growing cotton and selling cattle were the two main ways to make money in Texas. If you grew cotton, you had to get it to a place to sell it and the best way to do that was to take it on a cart to Galveston where it could be shipped by boat bec

Our city and state may have been frozen last week, but our learning was not. We are grateful that we had power for more of the time than many, our pipes didn't burst and flood our home, and our water was on. We know this was not the case for many others in our state and our prayers go out to them as they deal with the aftermath of the storm. While we waited out the cold, Luna was hard at work learning about The Civil War, new math concepts, and reading The Giver by Lois Lo