The putt-putt prodigy.

Eli has wanted to play putt-putt for a very long time. I must confess that I had held him back because he hasn't always been great at regulating his power when it comes to ball sports, but as we wondered past our local driving range the other day, I thought "Why not?" As you might imagine, he was very excited (and a bit miffed that there was a putt-putt course so close to our house that he didn't know about!).

As for his playing, well he was more timid than I had expected he might be (no signs at all of wild swings and flying golf balls!) and not unsurprisingly, he was really good at it! It really only took him a couple of holes to get the hang of it and before long he was slotting some amazing shots, including an awesome hole-in-one that I miraculously managed to capture on video! I really like his facial expressions in this video - it goes from concentration, to shock, to elation.




All in all it was a great little outing. On the way home I made the mistake of telling Eli about the more complex course designs that I've seen - including water features and lots of tunnels and moving obstacles - so it should have come as no surprise to me when he woke up this morning demanding that we find a harder course to tackle! Thankfully I distracted him today, but I'm sure we'll be heading to the coast sometime soon to try out our luck on new courses...

The experiment.

"What happens when food is left on the ground?" That is the question that I posed to Eli when we were thinking of a Science Fair project for him. Being well trained, Eli confidently declared "The ants come out and clean it all up". This then prompted some follow up questions for us to ponder, like "do ants like everything equally?" and "are the same ants everywhere?". Since neither of us really new the answers to these questions, we set about designing an experiment to find out. The plan was to see who came to clean up when we left ham, a chocolate biscuit and some pear out for them. To see if the same ants did the same thing everywhere, we decided to run the experiment three times, once in our front yard, once at school and once in the forest behind our house.

We ran the experiment at home first - here are some photos of our set up - with roughly equivalent amounts of ham, biscuit and pear placed out on our front lawn. We stepped back to watch what would happen and then recorded what we found every 10 minutes for a bit of an hour. Eli and I both kept records - his were quite a bit more artistic and creative than mine were!











What we learnt from our front yard was that ants just love ham! We had the occasional visitor to the biscuit (a green ant) and pear (some flies and a spider!), but the ham was constantly attacked by some very hungry looking tufted tyrant ants!

Armed with our knowledge of what happened at home, we stayed behind after school one day to run the experiment in a very different environment. We expected to see lots of ants arriving and maybe to all three foods since the daily activities of kids are likely to make the school grounds a very rich hunting ground for scavengers. What we didn't expect, was for a very hungry skink to show up! As you can see in these photos and the video, this little guy stalked his prey (the flies), but was also happy making off with ham.

 Eli continued with his colourful recording of the results and he was even keen to present his findings in a video or two as well...

Overall, we had only one species of ant (coastal brown ant) visit at school, with at least a couple present at each of the three food types on most of our recording occasions. Once again the ham was the most popular food though, with in excess of 50 ants trying to drag it back to the nest by the end of the experiment. The other difference from the test at home was the large number of flies present (including house flies and vinegar flies) and these were very much to the liking of our friendly little skink.

The final test was deep in the bushland behind our house. Here we expected to find more diversity in the ants that showed up and once again we saw a different mix of species arrive to feast on our ham! These ants were by far the largest and the most colourful of any we had seen and even though they didn't come in large numbers, it was great to watch them. That being said, we did have some late arrivals in large numbers and there were quite a few flies around too - not the same ones as at school though.

Now all that remains is a bit of work for Eli and I to turn all of our data into a poster for the Science Fair. Fortunately we have quite a bit of time before that needs to happen, but stay tuned for a Science Fair post in a few months time.

Scooting!

Eli has had a scooter for a while now and after some serious practice in recent times he's getting more and more accomplished and, as Grandma recently found out, much faster too. To address the dual challenges of keeping up with him and getting me some exercise, I decided that I'd get a scooter too, so Eli and I can explore the local pathways together. So, after making my purchase Eli and I headed down to the bay for a scoot. It was a beautiful day, just perfect for scooting our way alongside the water.















Some distance into our adventure we came across a really interesting little harbour which houses some pretty dilapidated old boats that Eli was keen on investigating. Many of them aren't seaworthy anymore, especially the semi-submerged one with the rocking chair in it!






We ended up scooting for a touch over 1.5 hours, so we both were pretty tired by the time we got back to the car. Eli was a little bit sore too, because we went down one pretty steep section of the track (which also had a lot of rocks and sticks on it) and Eli started going way too fast - his solution (which worked well in terms of slowing him down) was to basically launch himself over the front of his scooter and come down hard on the path at full stretch. Not surprisingly, he got back up with a few tears and some new gravel rash on his hands and hip. Thankfully he regained his composure pretty quickly (I told him it was ok and that I have had gravel rash on my hip probably 1000 times in my life and that it is all just a part of growing up) and was back on the scooter (and braving the steeper sections again) in no time at all. We've since done a few more scooter adventures too, both in our neighbourhood and along the Brisbane River, so I think I'll have to do some more homework to find where all of the best paths are...