April Dance Concert

Karianna had her second ALA dance concert of the year this afternoon.  She did a beautiful job, especially impressing us with the first hip-hop number....the girl's got spunk!  She says she really enjoys hip hop-she likes throwing out a bunch of attitude, which totally makes sense for Karianna.  As always, it is wonderful to see her so joyful and into it!  In the second number, she actually had a solo where she danced across the stage freestyle, doing pirouettes, fuetes, and kicks until she hit the other side.  She was so graceful, I was so impressed.  

Advanced Dance Team!

Karianna has found her love in life: dance.  She is taking 3 dance classes right now at Dance Spot here in STV-advanced lyrical, advanced jazz, and a tech class.  She has really been enjoying that and constantly claims 3 hours a week is not enough-she'd prefer to do 20. ;)  She is doing the regular dance class at ALA right now in place of a PE course, and it has definitely not challenged her at all-which is fine, she knew this was the only course she could take at ALA as a 7th grader.  So when announcements started coming out about trying out for ALA's advanced dance, she signed right up.  We got some contradictory news thereafter that only high school kids could try out for advanced dance, but that did not deter Karianna.  She and a few of her good friends who are also dancers went to try-outs anyway after myself and the other parents had emailed about it, and they let her try out over the course of a week.  I never doubted that she would make it, and it was pure joy when she came home proclaiming she had indeed made it into advanced dance-yea! Her two friends made it as well, so that will be a great thing for Karianna.  Of course, she wanted to take some dance pictures thereafter, so I complied ;) 

 The grace and ease of this pose just gets me.

 She looks like a Ninja Warrior in these ones-so strong and confident!

 And here's the joy. :) this is the one I edited, and I LOVE how the light shines on her! Such a talented young lady!

Public Performance!

 Karianna has been taking voice lessons this year from a gal in our ward, and they were able to perform the National Anthem today at an ALA high school basketball game! Karianna was on harmony as she's able to hold it really well, and I was super impressed with how good and well-blended they sounded!  Such an accomplishment, in my opinion, to sing in front of your peers-at least in Karianna's case, as this is her school.  Super proud!

Science Projects

 This is just a crazy week with Jared gone.  We have to finish up science experiments this week, so we hit it hard today.  JD's experiment this year is all about dehydrating food.  We were able to borrow a food dehydrator from a family in our ward and interview the Dad, which I thought was GREAT research for JD.  He decided he wanted to dehydrate bananas, strawberries, an carrots.  He weighed them before and after with the goal of determining how much weight is lost in the process, which is essentially water weight. Here's the visual results, which I thought were pretty cool!

 Karianna's experiment was researching acids and bases, and then using that info to test different liquids in terms of how well they cleaned pennies. We ordered litmus paper online, and we really enjoyed testing different liquids, including others that were not in her experimental design (as well as some weird concoctions she created!  Her experiment showed vinegar cleaned the penny the best by far, which of course is very acidic, whereas bleach left the penny majorly discolored.

 Just an interesting shot of the chemical reaction of the bleach!

Jordan's 9th Birthday!