Age: 7 & 10
Science Co-Op Session 1 Week 1: Cold and Very Cold
Agenda:
- Norse Myths
- Cold and Very Cold
- Blow up Balloon with Dots
After a whole year of gap year traveling, we are back to doing our science co-op. This is the only way I’m able to squeeze in science, by forcing myself to meet with other homeschoolers once a week.
After talking to Eclectic Mama, we decided to change the format of the class now that the kids are older. Namely:
- Limit to age 7 and up.
- Limit to 4 kids in the beginning
- One person teach
- $10 material fee per person.
- A scheduled start and ending time
- Bilingual science/history class
The format of the class got set once I realized that I really do want to teach the class because I wanted to do Montessori science. I’m partial to it because it ties all the different disciplines in science together. The other thing I really need, because I now have a 4th grader, is a class that doesn’t just have fun activities, but more thoughtful discussion and perhaps some writing.
In order to do that I had to limit it to a group of similar age kids (3 year difference max). To help with the prep and to encourage people to arrive on time, we also added a $10 material fee and I even wrote up a class description. All to make it feel like a class that you need to commit to.
Lastly, now that the children are older, we can add English into the class. In fact, most of the kids actually need some English instruction to help with English exposure. This, along with the material fee, would help make prep easier, as one reason I kept procrastinating was because I did not relish the painstaking task of translating something like the First Great Lesson story into Chinese.
Thankfully I have cool friends who are easy going and willing to go along with my always overly ambitious plans. Eclectic Mama even spent an afternoon with me while I babble through my lesson plan options. Because I can only think through problems by talking about it, rather than thinking in my head.
Norse Myths
Eclectic Mama started our first class by sharing Norse Mythology. She used the Usborne Illustrated Norse Myths book and translated on the fly. There is this really lovely set of Norse Gods poster from Veritable Hokum that she printed and cut out. That website has posters from other mythology too.
There is also a lovely poster of the Norse Mythology World.
The children love her story so much they keep asking for more details. Makes me want to get the book for the children to read!
Cold and Very Cold
Material Needed: thermometer, tray, ice cubes, container, English instructions.
There’s a line in the First Great Lesson that says:
When we think of cold, we think of ice. But ice is positively hot if you compare it with the coldness of space.
Two years ago, I presented the First Great Lesson in the format I learned it, showing the experiments while I tell the story. This time around I wanted to show the kids some experiments they didn’t see the first time around. Since colder than cold is something that is really hard to imagine, I wanted to do an experiment this time around.
The experiment is very simple and I created a sample worksheet to go along with it since the kids can write now. The worksheet came in both English and Chinese version and I gave the older kids English and the younger kids the Chinese version.
The kids were split into two groups. We first read through the whole worksheet together and methodically went through what they needed to do. They were then left to their own device. It took awhile for them to run the experiment and finish the worksheet because they had to write.
Sorry I have no good pics of the experiment because I was busy conducting it.
Blow up Balloon with Dots
Materials Needed: Balloon, dry erase marker
By this time they were getting antsy because it was close to lunch time. So I quickly demonstrated another concept in the story, that after the Big Bang, as the universe expanded, the particles moved away from each other and never met again. (Don’t quote me on it.)
First I showed the kids a balloon that’s dotted. Then I asked in Chinese, “What do you think will happen to the dots when I blow up the balloon?” They correctly hypothesized that the dots will move away from each other.
Then I blew up the balloon to show them.
End of class! Kids were antsy and didn’t really want to try it themselves.