Manic Monday

After a pretty stressful evening the night before waging war on fiddly bits of candles I left the house mostly prepared for today's science session. A few of us home edders have started meeting up on a fortnightly basis for science and English 'lessons'. I had volunteered to take the first science session. We are following the crest awards http://www.britishscienceassociation.org/crest-awards which gives you set lesson plans. All I had to do was choose one of the lessons and get the supplies together, then explain what to do. However nothing is as simple as it looks, chopping up candles to turn them into washers sounds easy but isn't!

We made band rollers to demonstrate how wind up toys/items work by storing energy and releasing it. I also gave them a worksheet so they could record the results of how far they travelled after changing one thing at a time. Adding more friction etc. by adding elastic bands or other items from the bag of goodies I brought. I'm pretty sure the session went quite well and all the kids did a better job than my trial version last night did.

'M' was in the younger group and they were working on a display based around colours by gluing bits of fabric and tissue to the colour word.

After a quick drink break the groups swapped over and 'M' worked on a slightly younger aimed science session. They were rolling unlabelled cans down a ramp to try and work out what was in each of the cans. They had to choose whether the cans contained dog food, beans or soup based on how far they rolled. They did a really good job considering all the kids were 5ish and under. They figured out that the dog food would be heaviest as it contained meat and was packed in the can tightly. Then the beans, followed by the soup which rolled the least furthest.

The boys worked in groups on a story board, which is hopefully going to turn into a short film at the next session .

Next few hours were spent having lunch at the park. Make the most of the last of the warm sun.