Friday 1 June 2012

Rubber band buggies

For the most part of our homeschooling so far, we have been either working by ourselves or dipping in and out of different groups on an ad-hoc basis.  Recently, we have found a group of homeschoolers that work loosely like a co-op, and we have been spending quite a bit of time with them in a series of hands-on science and math-type classes.

One of the first classes that we attended with this group was a introductory physics class that investigates how, by winding up the elastic band on a rubber band buggy and then releasing it, the buggy will move. 


During the short preliminary lecture, the children were asked to consider the factors which determine how far the buggy moves before they went on to investigate how the distance travelled depends on the number of twists in the rubber band.   The class was then divided into groups, each equipped with their own buggy to carry out the experiment and to record their measurements before converting their results into graphs.
 

This post is linked up to several blog hops, where you can see what other homeschoolers have been busy with.

3 comments:

  1. This is excellent. We are in a history co-op that we love, but I've been thinking we need more time with science. The co-op plan was to switch to science for the summer, but I'm not sure we will be able to participate. I hope you continue to post activities from your meetings as I would love to do them with my kids or our group if things work out. It looks like your first one was a great way to start. Are you following a curriculum or a theme, or are the topics more random?

    ReplyDelete
  2. The science sessions don't follow any curriculum or theme, so they are quite random in terms of topics. The only consistency is that they are all about physics (as opposed to other science areas such as life science or chemistry).

    ReplyDelete
  3. I love ideas that physically involve the children in the learning process.

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...