When Life Hands You Lemons Week...

Well, this week's theme was...true to life?  I should have chosen a different name because on Monday afternoon two weeks ago, life did hand me a lemon and I threw my back out.  So lemon week was on a bit of a hold. But don't you worry, this past week we took that proverbial lemon and finally did get to make that lemonade.

Here's what you need for our lemon week activities:
lots of lemons!
(1 for each person for the science exp., 1 for writing, 1 for each color of paint for stamping, about 15 for lemonade)
food coloring
baking soda
dishwashing detergent

white cardstock
q-tips
an iron
various paints
white paper
sugar

Science Day
For our experiment, we made lemon volcanoes.  Super easy, fairly cheap and loads of fun.  The original experiment was found here:

 Lemon Volcano

I would advise putting in the baking soda first and then the food coloring.  That worked better for us. Also, we just poured more lemon juice on top whenever we wanted another "eruption", instead of stirring with a stick.  It went on forever!

Great colors and I think one of our favorite experiments yet!

Craft Day
This activity could really fall under science day or craft day.  We wrote secret messages in lemon juice on paper with q-tips and then exposed them later using heat.  The original idea came from here:

Making Invisible Ink

This was super easy and the girls loved writing secret messages.  After we let them dry, I ironed the messages (the iron needs to be very hot) and we got to see what they said.

If you want to make it a science experiment, you can talk about how the heat breaks down the acid in the juice!

Also, for another craft, we did lemon stamping.  We simply cut lemons in half and dipped in paint and stamped away.  We tried drying the lemons out and it didn't work as well as just cutting and stamping.

Field Trip Day
For field trip day we headed to the beach.  I had a very old friend who was vacationing there and we just had to go see her. Which has absolutely nothing to do with lemons.  Unless you count the fact that I packed lemonade in the cooler for my kids to drink.   Oh.  And I did squeeze lemon on my calamari that I ate.  So there.

Food Day
I found lots of lemon recipes to try but let's face it, sometimes I am just wiped out.  So, we did the most important one, which was making homemade lemonade.  The girls got to find out that making it homemade was a lot of work but so delicious!  There are lots of recipes out there but we used this one:   Homemade Lemonade Recipe

And just in case you aren't as exhausted as me from going to the beach and want to give it a whirl, here is the other lemon recipe I had my eye on....looks like a strawberry lemonade whoopie pie! YUM!

Strawberry Lemonade Cookies

I hope if you have a lemon week, it's all sunshine!

K