WEEK 7: We are Inventors!
So the last week of the TD Summer Reading Program has come and
gone. I hope that these last 7 weeks has been as fun for you as they have been
for me! We have had so many “Eureka!” moments this summer and discovered a lot
of new things. We have talked about everything from gardening to mystery and
oceans to space!
For the last week of the reading club our theme was We are
Inventors! Instead of talking about
other people’s discoveries, I wanted everyone to find their own creativity and
have a Eureka moment themselves.
We started to discuss all the different inventions in the world,
like when you wake up in the morning it’s dark in your room so you turn on a light
switch to make it bright. We talked about how they all go to the library, if it
was by car, then they rode in an invention!
The first thing we did was play outside with a huge parachute!
We played lots of fun games including cat and mouse, shark attack and of course
the mushroom! It was fun to run around outside for a while instead of always
being inside!
Then we came inside and invented our own tinfoil boat. Here is
what we did!
Materials
- Tin
foil
- Bowl
- Scissors
- Pennies
- Water
Directions
- Cut a
piece of tin foil 5 x 6 inches.
- Fold
up the sides of the boat so it will not sink and hold a cargo of pennies.
- Place
the boat in the bowl of water. Begin adding pennies for the boat's cargo.
- See
how many pennies your boat can carry before it sinks.
- Have
some friends over and try this experiment with them. See which one of you
can create the boat that will carry the greatest amount of cargo.
- Be
sure to dry the pennies before you begin adding them as cargo because
remember water has weight!
- Have
the person who created the boat begin adding pennies to their boat while
another person counts the number of pennies as they are added to the boat.
- Try different ways to distribute the weight of the pennies on your barge so you can carry the maximum number. Tinfoil Boat Directions
We then came and worked on our flying airplanes, I printed off
directions but a few tried their own designs which were great!!
Then we made marshmallow robots, we had toothpicks and colorful marshmallows.
We didn’t start off with our robots; we started out with inventing buildings! I
gave the kids 2 minutes to build the best building they could! After they
finished the building we moved onto the robots! I loved how many different
variations of robots we saw!!
We had a little end of the summer celebration and we ate
cupcakes and talked about everything we were excited about for the next year!
The most exciting thing that we did was eat the tomatoes off the
plant that we planted 7 weeks ago at the very first reading program!! How cool
is that?!
Thank you to everyone who participated in this year’s reading
program, I hope to see all your wonderful smiling faces next summer!
