BFSU: D5: Time and the Earth’s Turning
Montessori: Introduction to Notation of Time: Shadow Clocks, History of the Clock
I admit, I’ve been feeling unmotivated to plan our science curriculum this semester. Our Spring semester started in the beginning of January and I feel like I’ve been just squeaking by with random ideas I dream up a few days before each meeting. We did a Rivers presentation and also combined history and science with a mummification project and then somehow found reasons with the schedule not to do more science.
But some things came up in the personal life and I had to spend days cleaning up the mess, thereby forced to not sit in front of the computer all day like I’m want to do. That somehow spurred me off my lazy bum slightly to properly plan our first science presentation in February.
Because BFSU divides up the curriculum into 4 areas and I felt very lost, not knowing how to integrate the topics and what order to introduce them, I went back to history and studying time and clock. Understanding time is the first step in learning history. I figured with most of the kids in our co-op turning 6 this year, it is a good time to revisit this subject even though we had covered it a bit last semester with The Long Black Strip.
Here’s one more reason why I love Montessori curriculum. When the children study time, they not only learn about how to tell time, but they learn time as a topic. Why did people want to tell time? How did they try to tell time throughout history? What is the history of the clock? How do the names of the months came about? It’s more than learning one isolated topic, but rather seeing how one topic can be studied from multiple subjects. I guess this is what you call a unit study?
Montessori adds to the unit study idea by integrating it all topics into one master curriculum so you can see how the topics are inter-related to each other. That is one main focus of Montessori: peace education. What’s this got to do with peace? Her idea is that if you understand that everything in the world is inter-connected, that your actions affect others, that we all depend on each other, we would not be so war prone.
Anyhoo, back to studying time and clock.
In our album, there are several activities related to time. One is doing the shadow clock. This introduces the children to the passage of time by having them observe how their shadows move throughout the day. If you do this during different times of the year you actually will see different shadow lengths and direction I think. Another is studying the history of clock. There are so many different clocks people have made over history: sundials, water clock, fire clock, sand clock, etc. I really wanted to have the kids try and make the fire clock but I didn’t have time to gather the materials. There are a couple of other ones as I mentioned, on learning months of the year and days of the week.
We started first by reading the book, 慌張先生 by 賴馬. The book talks about Mr. Hurry who is very late for his performance at the theater. Only to realize, after he’s hurried to the theater and hurriedly dressed, that today’s not the day for his performance. The book has actual moveable hands for you to manipulate as you read.
Shadow Clock
Materials Needed: colored chalk
During my training, we went out 6-7 times in the day and took turn drawing one volunteer’s shadow throughout the day. Each time, labeling the time on top of the shadow. In our co-op, we divided the kids into teams of 2, they chose their color of choice and drew each other.
What was neat was Classical Mom’s daughter, having studied time already, went off and drew a sundial. She obviously knew what we were trying to do. Thumper saw it and wanted to do it herself. This would have been a great follow up activity for her, researching and creating her own sundial. But alas, we went off to visit grandma for Chinese New Year and it’s now all forgotten.
Ways to Measure Time
Material needed: Jenga or Dominos
This presentation wasn’t in my album, but I came across it in my research of clocks. The idea is to teach children that clocks are not the only way we use to measure time. I saw YouTube videos of various contraptions people created to measure time.
For our kids, I decided to have them try and measure time with dominos. We tried it multiple times and decided that with the number of dominos we had, we can really measure 5 seconds of time.
Here is our first try, which did not work.
Sand Timer
Material Needed: water bottles or yukult bottles, Daiso sand, aluminum foil, painter’s tape, toothpicks.
After showing kids pics of various clocks throughout history and ordering them by date of invention, I set the kids up to create a 1 minute sand timer. You fill the bottle with sand, separate them with an aluminum foil, put a teeny tiny hole through it, and tape it up with painter’s tape.
Here are our two finished products. We determined that the bigger bottle was able to keep about 1 minute time and the yukult bottles 30 seconds. This took the kids about 3-4 tries to figure out.
Looks easy right? Well, when I tried it first at home, I ran into all sorts of problems. Primarily, the bottles and hole need to be of a large enough size. Without a large hole, the sand doesn’t flow nicely. With that big of a hole, the bottle needs to be big enough to hold all the sand you need. This is partly because our “sand” is Daiso large grain sand.
It was totally satisfying for me, figuring out why it didn’t work. But the sad thing is the children didn’t get a chance to do the same. I know if this is a self initiated project some children would have the attention span to figure it out. Thumper is starting to have that kind of patience.
My hope is that when we do enough of these projects and group the children accordingly, we will eventually be able to have them do a project completely by themselves, and figure out the solution after several tries. Because the joy in science really isn’t in doing these projects, but in figuring out how to get it to work.
Other Resources & Chinese Vocabulary
One new vocabulary I learned was sand timer. Which is called 沙漏 (sha lou3).
If you’re studying time, there are many books about time, even in Chinese. We also listened to Grandfather’s clock a few months back when we were studying the moon and time. And I just found this YouTube video called 沙漏！