Science!

[liralen]

It's been kind of cool and kind of scary, but I've been doing science experiments with and for Jet's classroom once a week. John's been doing them once a week as well, on Fridays, and I get Mondays. The teacher is very strong in the liberal arts, but asked for some help with the science part of the program from us because she knows us.



I'll admit the first couple of weeks, before the kids really got to understand what it was all about, and I was kind of nervous about how things were going to go, it wasn't so great.

But after a few weeks, we've all settled into the routine. The teacher sets up all her framework for how she wants the notebooks to be worked on, with the nomenclature she started. And I get to just Do The Experiment either with the kids or in front of them, and away we go. The fun thing is that we discuss what the experiment is going to be, they all make predictions on how they think it's going to go, we set things up, do it, record all the results, and then they get to figure out their own conclusions and cite evidence to back it up.

All good solid stuff.

We're having a lot of fun with various lovely properties of water. Like how it expands and contracts with temperature, but then expands again when it becomes a solid. How evaporation and condensation work (no there aren't tiny holes in the side of that glass), and how it's stored and circulated by the Earth and earth. *laughs* How it can generate power and what actually does the work.

It was really fun hearing about the blue ice cubes that floated in a glass of room temp water, but the melt off ran down, trickled to the bottom of the glass. That was one of John's days.

The coolest thing is that even the smallest experiment has all the kids going OOoooohhh! and AAaaaaaahhh! They're so excited about it all and about this other way of thinking about things, and how physical reality allows them to repeat a phenomenon as many times as they want and explain why it works to others. And it's the whole class that's pretty amazed by it all, so... I just want to keep them interested like that.

The experiments have been fun to set up, too, though some of them are a lot more work than others. Luckily, there is plenty of time before the science segment for me to come and putter with all the boxes and set up all the trays for all the groups and just have it work. That's been pretty good, and the "Science To Go" boxes have had everything they've said they would, so that's been a very pleasant set of things to work with.

The best part is being able to talk with Jet about all the experiments afterward and how he thought it went. Like today's was pretty boring, but he thought I did the best that could be done with it. *laughs* I liked that. Nice when he says that he thought I did the best I could.