Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Turtles, Simple Machines, Soap Carving & Printing ~November 19th

I know I keep saying it but I love our co-op. My kids are getting so many opportunities to do hands on things that I simply would not have time to prepare for at home. By splitting the work we are able to cover many subjects & therefore many experiments & experiences. And there is the added benefit of being with friends! Yay!

Science Class
The girls put a teaspoon of vanilla in the balloon. The test is to see if the aroma of the vanilla can still be detected when it is inside the blown up balloon.

Next they were divided into 2 groups to make a sea turtle. It is one of the sea creatures we have been studying.


The children used rulers to measure his proportions & then used masking tape to make his outline.

This is one of the teams with their turtle. I never realized they could be so big!


Next it was my turn to teach Prairie Primer. After going over our questions & reading we started in on our hands on learning. First we talked about Simple Machines.

The children took turns hammering nails into a board & pulling them out. Do you know what the simple machine is & what type it is?
We also did an experiment with a fulcrum, board & weight as well as an experiment with a wheel & axle.

Our next project was carving. As we all know Pa Ingalls did a lot of this & was very talented. We used Ivory soap, cookie cutters for the outlines & butter knives. Of course there was plenty of newspaper to keep the mess in check. I found directions in a book but liked these from Ivory even better.

Elvis made a snowman.
Some of the children made full shapes and others carved it into the tops of their soap making more of an outline. Both came out fantastic! Sorry I didn't get more pics. I was busy helping & teaching. =0)

I was in nursery during Geography but came back out for History. The children learned about the printing press & did their own experiment using Alpha-Bits. As you can see Bugsy & his friend couldn't resist a little snack time too. Lol!

Each child spelled out his/her name & then placed the letters backward on their paper. A mirror image if you will. Then we blobbed the paint on the top of each letter. After that we took another piece of blank paper & carefully pressed it on top of the painted letters. Lifting it off showed it had printed their name! I can't show you the finished result due to privacy. {real names aren't used on my blog} But it was neat! I encourage you to try sometime. Not only does it show how setting up a mirror image works to make it print forward but it shows you how much labor went into setting up the type! They had to do a lot of tedious work to print newspapers in Ben Franklin's day!

Boo Bear works carefully on hers.

Mrs. Jody helped Bugsy out. I just love her!


Another successful day!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

cool