08/07/2014: Bouncing with mischief

Counting

We seem to have a lot of boys with us at the moment and yesterday it felt as if they had all been touched with the joy of summer. Watching them reminded me of my early years of home educating with my eldest boy (now 12) when I didn't feel the need to do any formal work throughout the warmer months.

Exploring shapes with the pinart gadget

My son was constantly on the move with ideas exploding out of him like fireworks, the ideas were often just as short lived but still very important in that brief moment of curiosity. It was hard work to keep up with at the time (he had 'ants in his pants' and couldn't stay still) but it was also a developmental stage that, in hindsight, is fascinating to recall. Exploration was so important to him but particularly destruction, how else would he find out how things worked?! Thankfully the passage of time has blurred how frustrating it was to live with, this thirst for knowledge that he needed to observe for himself with his burgeoning independence.

Pinart gadget

Back to today and we had lots of exploring. There was a new gadget to us, a pinart toy. This had just about everything small enough in the room thrust into it!

Preparing soup

The older children worked hard in the kitchen preparing vegetable soup for us all to share, you will soon be able to find the recipes here, I just need to find the time to type them out.

Lots of soup to eat!

 There is currently a fascination with creating many hearts...

Counting hearts

 ...and lots of stars! All good opportunities to practise counting.

More stars to count

Our science experiment this week was a simple one involving bouncing different balls from a height of 1 metre. The children could see how the different materials gave the balls different 'bounce' properties. It also involved taking multiple measurements and calculating averages. The worksheet can be downloaded from here. A parent suggested that this experiment could be easily adapted to try the same ball on different surfaces.

We did this with children from 3-8 so didn't delve too deeply into the whys but for older children this is a good one for looking at energy. Each ball loses a different amount of energy when they collide with the floor. Some of the kinetic energy (movement) will be transferred as heat to the ground but most of it will change into heat in the ball as it's shape distorts (also a little energy is transferred to the air as sound).

And finally, as I discussed him in the first paragraph I feel that it is only fair to show him in the last photo. I love this image of my son because he really enjoyed looking after the babies for a few minutes but would never want to admit it!

Babysitting

And next time...
15/07/2014 A helter-skelter session. Having found the air rocket for our recent cloud experiment I will be bringing this to the park for a bit of fun (dependent on weather). The big butterfly count will be happening from the 19th July to the 20th August, the idea is that you spend 15 minutes on a sunny day within the time period to observe all the butterflies and moths. Our next meeting is before the dates but a practise run could be fun, it will be interesting to see if we'll be able to identify any before scaring them away!

Our next organised activity session will be on the 22/07/2014.