Science Saves the Day!

We are at the point in the school year where we just want to be done. T is at a spot in just about every subject that he is at a good stopping point for the year. I'm not saying that he is finished because he is in the middle of the 3 year cycle (6-9) so there is plenty left for him to learn in lower elementary. He just happens to have finished several specific areas that I feel are a good stopping point. We only have three more weeks of school and two of those will be educational travel, not classroom work. Right now we are doing lots of reviewing, spelling, reading and fun projects.

Today, I was browsing pinterest for a fun project and came upon this fun chemistry activity called the Penny Battery. This particular activity is from Khan Academy (if you haven't heard of them, they offer lots of free online instruction in many different areas). The way it works, you look at the activity guide to determine what materials you need and the basics, then you watch videos showing you how to do it and what it means. I was very happy to find that we had everything we needed at home and it could be gathered in just a few minutes. That may not be the case for your home if you don't have family members who are into electronics.

For this activity, we collected 5 pennies (4 that were newer than 1982), a piece of cardboard cut into 4 small squares, water, salt, vinegar, sand paper, electrical tape and an LED.

We followed the instructions by sanding one side of the 4 post-1982 pennies so that the zinc core was completely exposed on one side. This allowed us to access the zinc on one side and the copper on the other side of each of the 4 pennies. The pre-1982 penny does not have a zinc core so it was only copper. The sanding took the most time, about 5 mins per penny (T did 3 of them while I was collecting the other materials).

Then we added salt to the water to make a saturated solution. To this we added a splash of vinegar to make it acidic. Then we soaked the cardboard squares while we finished sanding.

Once everything was ready, we stacked the pennies and the salt water soaked cardboard to make the battery. Each sanded penny was placed with zinc (silver color) facing up, then a soaked square was placed on top of it. Next, we placed one set on top of the other ending in the copper only penny. Each cell is made of zinc, salt water cardboard and copper in that order and there are 4 cells in this battery.

Once the battery was made, we added the LED, placing the longer wire on the top, copper penny. The light lit up. This was extra exciting for us because we didn't know which color LED we had. In the video they suggested red because it requires just under 2 volts (which is what this battery produces). We borrowed our LED from my husband's electronics stash while he was out of the house and nothing was labeled. It turned out that we had a yellow LED. When we looked it up, we found that yellow requires just slightly over 2 volts (which might be why it wasn't as bright as it could have been).

T was very excited about his LED lighting up and after we wrapped it with electrical tape, he proceeded to walk around the house using it as a flashlight in dark rooms.

The Khan Academy also has a video explaining how this reaction works. It was clear enough for my nearly 8 year old to understand. I drew a small diagram while I was explaining it to him. Please ignore my horrible handwriting, I am a scientist and we aren't known for our handwriting.

There is also a challenge in this activity to determine how to alter the battery to make a blue LED light up. A blue LED requires more voltage so that means more pennies. T quickly said that you would need 7 pennies, and then we watched the video. He was right, seven pennies lit up the blue LED. We didn't have a blue LED to test it out with but seeing it the video was good enough for him to cheer that he knew he was right LOL.

There is just something about Science that will peek interest and keep things going when we are just running out of steam. Thanks Khan Academy! (I am in no way affiliated with Khan Academy, I just really enjoyed using this site and thought Id pass it on. Also, you don't have to sign up for anything to use the site, it only asks you to create an account if you want to track your progress)

Cursive, Spelling, Fractions....Oh My!

We are in the school home stretch now that it is May. There are a few areas that T needs to work on before we stop for the summer.

Last year, T really struggled with his penmanship. It took him so long to write anything down and it was really hurting his ability to express himself in writing. In Montessori, we allow for phonetic spelling to give the child the ability to write down their thoughts without worry of spelling. I have allowed this phonetic spelling until now because it really helped him to grow in his writing ability and also his penmanship. Now that he is finishing his second year of elementary, I feel that he needs to start focusing on proper spelling an sentence structure in his writing. His penmanship has improved greatly, and we have decided to start cursive as well.

In his work with cursive, he has become interested in Calligraphy. He checked out a few books at the local library and we picked up a simple cartridge style Calligraphy pen for him at an office supply store. 1, 2, 3 Calligraphy by Eleanor Winters

Our classroom Language shelf got a small makeover to accommodate his new works. I removed the metal insets, which he doesn't need anymore. B hasn't started using them yet, and when she does, I'll need to put them on a lower shelf anyway. The grammar, sentence analysis box and cursive sandpaper letters on the left have been out for a while.

On the right, Montessori blue lined paper, on top of that is a sample of the cursive alphabet for him to use as a reference. On the left, a spelling workbook that we picked up at a used book store (used as a supplement) and under that, a Choose your Cursive Challenge worksheet.

On the left, I left out the metal inset paper and pencils because we are still using these for fraction work. Below them, Dictionary Research cards  , a Children's Dictionary and a Dictionary workbook.

Fractions are something T has worked with before, but we are working on advancing through addition and subtraction of fractions right now. He has been enjoying using his Wrap-Ups when he doesn't want to do a full lesson.

If you haven't used Wrap-ups before, you should give them a try. They have 10 plastic cards that you wrap a string around as you answer the problem. For fractions, it starts with the picture on the left and the corresponding fraction written on the right. They are self correcting too! Once the child finishes his work, he flips it over and there are lines on the back that show where the string should be when it is done correctly. As long as no lines show, they got all the answers correct.

T has also been using his Multiplication Wrap-Ups to get faster with his multiplication tables.

Today we had a little fun with fractions and graphing using M&Ms candy. We just took a regular size bag of M&Ms and poured them into a bowl. T sorted them by color and counted how many of each there were. He used graph paper to make a bar graph.

We then determined what fraction of the whole bag each color was. There were 23 pieces so we concluded that 23/23 = 1 whole.

T added all of the fractions together to determine that they do, in fact, equal 23/23. Then I gave him a few addition problems which he could do because they had a common denominator. After he did a few addition problems, he tried a subtraction problem. Then he wanted to eat some M&Ms so we took 23/23 - 2/23 and found it to equal 21/23. Once we got to think point, he "needed" to eat that candy so we talked about reducing until they were gone.

Montessori Checkerboard and GIVEAWAY!

*post contains affiliate links

I am very excited to announce my very first giveaway!! I have recently become an affiliate for Montessori Services. Montessori Services is a wonderful online store where you can shop for everything to prepare your Montessori environment at home. I mentioned this store in a past post of my favorite Montessori suppliers and they ranked second, but only because of the fact that they do not offer a wide variety of Montessori materials. They do rank first on my list for supplies to prepare the environment. If you are not familiar with Montessori, a prepared environment simply means that they classroom is set up so that the children can do all of their tasks independently. Lessons are set up with all of their materials together on low shelfs so they can be accessed easily. In the primary and toddler rooms, there are small versions of everything so that children don't need to use step stools or handle tools that are too large for them. Montessori Services has all of these wonderful supplies and many of them are offered in sets to make it even easier. They also have a sister site called For Small Hands that has even more tools in small sizes for young children.

I have a great item from Montessori Services that I would like to share with you. The Montessori Checkerboard Mat (Item# MA175) is a must have for anyone who will be using Montessori at home for elementary.

Corresponding numbers are written below each square

Bead bars 1-9 fit nicely in each square. 

(These are 8mm beads)

This product would be great for Montessori classrooms as well but there is one feature that stands out for homeschoolers and that is its size. I have heard so many homeschoolers complain about how large the checkerboard is, and I thought about this too. Traditionally, a Montessori checkerboard is about 30 x 18 inches in size (depending on brand) and it is wooden. They are too big to place on a regular shelf, and even if you did have a shelf large enough, that is a lot of wasted space. In the homeschool environment, space is something we really need to think about. This lovely checkerboard mat from Montessori Services is made of fabric and rolls up neatly with a little ribbon to tie it closed. It fits quite nicely on the shelf with plenty of room for the beads and number chips on the same shelf.

This is an IKEA shelf with small cubby sizes openings. This shelf has the checkerboard mat rolled up (black), a felt place value mat for the stamp game (green), stamp game (bottom box) and white/gray number tiles (smaller box).

Another wonderful great feature of this checkerboard mat is just that it is fabric rather than wood. I know that in Montessori we love wooden materials. Wood always feels so nice in the hands and holds up nicely to use. This material is an exception in my opinion. When the beads are placed on the wooden checkerboard they often slide around and even roll off. Some say that this helps children learn to be more careful when using the material but I don't think its really necessary. In my experience, when beads roll it just frustrates the child and they don't really learn to be more careful they just don't want to use that material anymore. This checkerboard mat changes all of that. On the fabric the beads never roll, they stay exactly where they are placed. There is no unnecessary frustration when a bead is accidentally bumped into another square which ends in a wrong answer. Oh, and this checkerboard mat is also less expensive than any of the wooden versions I have ever seen.

I'd like to explain a little more about the Montessori Checkerboard for those who may not have used one before. The checkerboard uses the hierarchal colors (green = units, blue = tens, red = hundreds), and continues to hundred millions on the bottom row. As you go up in rows the numbers get larger. The second row starts with tens and goes to unit trillions. The third row starts with hundreds and goes to ten trillions and the top row starts with thousands and goes to hundred trillions. Children use these boxes for doing long multiplication.

In our introduction to this material, T simply placed beads on the mat to build numbers that I suggested (2,547).

The first calculation T did with the checkerboard, he worked through the problem: 7436 x 42.
First, he placed white number tiles on the bottom of the mat indicating the multiplicand (7436). Then he placed gray number tiles on vertically to indicate the multiplier (42). Then he flipped over the top digit of the multiplier (4) and worked only with the first row on the bottom (2). For each box, he multiplied that digit times the multiplier (6 x 2), (3 x 2), (4 x 2), (7 x 2). He then combined bead bars so that each box only had one bead bar in it. Next he flipped over the two multiplier tiles so that the top digit was showing (4). He continued in the same manner multiplying each digit of the multiplicand (6 x 4), (3 x 4), (4 x 4), (7 x 4).

Again he combined bead bars so that each box only had one bead bar in it.

Next comes the fun part, the diagonal slide. The bead bars in the upper row were slid down to the bottom row following their corresponding colors (i.e. the beads in the blue box would slide diagonally to the blue box below and so on for all colors). Lastly, the bead bars were combined, and exchanged if necessary, so that each box had only one bead bar. This gave T his answer with one digit in each place value box. He found that 7436 x 42 = 312,312.

These kind of huge numbers make lower elementary kids so excited. Once they see how they really can do this type of material they only want to choose larger and larger numbers to work with.

It is best for children to know their basic multiplication tables before doing this work but it is not necessary. Things will go much faster if they can just do the simple one digit multiplication in their heads but if they can not you don't have to hold off on this material. Just have them place that number of bead bars in the box and count them, then exchange the beads according to place value.

I have recieved this product free of charge in exchange for my honest review. This post contains affiliate links, if you click on one of my links and then make a purchase, I will receive a small commission, it will cost you nothing as the customer. Thank your for supporting our homeschool.

Now that you have seen how much we love our new Montessori Checkerboard Mat, I'm sure that you want your own. Here is where my giveaway comes in. Montessori Services has graciously offered a $50 gift certificate to one lucky winner. You can use it towards one of these wonderful mats, or whatever else you choose from this store. Let me tell you, my shopping list for this store is long. If you would like to enter for this awesome prize please use the Rafflecopter widget below. This giveaway is only for residents of USA and Canada (no PO Boxes).


a Rafflecopter giveaway

Outdoor fun with Science and Geometry

The spring weather has called us outdoors many days in the last few weeks. Friday we decided to take our study of Geometry to a new level. We combined science and geometry in a fun little project. T had a lot of fun practicing his new protractor skills and spotting angles in the real world.

We started out with a little nature walk where we looked for angles in nature and man-made objects along the way. This stick was the first thing T spotted angles on. We brought along some sidewalk chalk to mark the angles and he used his protractor to measure them. He knew just by looking which was obtuse and which acute.

We found many angles on a picnic table we came across.

And right angles on this park bench (it was a bit windy)

We found a right angled isosceles in the parking lot 

(this was the parking lot for the playground and there were no cars so it was safe to stop and break out the protractor)

At this point it was too windy to perform our science experiment so we went home for lunch. Luckily, the wind died down in a couple of hours and we were able to go back outside and work while B napped.

Angles on our driveway.

A little practice on adding angles, 100º plus 80º equals 180º, or a straight line.

Oh look, the grass is turning green finally. Found an acute angle of concrete next to an obtuse angle of grass.

Our garage door is covered in right angles

Our science experiment was determining at what angle would we get the most distance with a straw rocket. We used this wonderful printable that I found through this blog.

The directions show how to make one of these cute little mini paper rockets. A template is provided and you just cut it out and roll it around a pencil, then attach the fins with tape. T decided to add a little color to his rockets before we cut them out. We decided to make two rockets to give more accurate results. Most science experiments need a good size pool of results to be accurate. At home it was just the two of us performing this experiment so we made two rockets and each of us did the experiment with each rocket. This helped us fill in the charge provided in the printable which is made for groups of 3 or 4 students. 

Once you build your rocket, you place a straw inside and blow as hard as you can to launch it.

We took our rockets, protector, tape measure and chalk outside. We marked the starting line with chalk and the launcher stood behind the line. Then we lined up the rocket to the proper angles using the protractor and launched the rocket. We measured the distance the rocket travelled and recorded it on our chart.

(not the best picture because I had to hold the protractor and the camera at the same time, but you get the idea)

Ready, Aim.....

Fire!

Before we performed the experiment, T was asked to predict which angle would produce the farthest distance. The four angles tested were 90º, 70º, 45º and 20º. He chose the 45º angle. He knew that the 90º angle would give the least distance because it is meant to make rockets go straight up. He didn't really know why he thought the 45º angle was best except that it was not the closest to 90º like 70º is and its not the furthest away like 20º is. 

Here is our result chart

(in the launcher # boxes I added notes as to what color the rocket was (Green/Red, Blue/Orange) and the first initial of the person who launched it so we could keep track.)

We used inches instead of cm because our tape measure wasn't metric. 

As you can see from the chart, T was correct about the 45º angle being the best angle if you are trying to shot your rocket the longest distance. I drew a little diagram for him to show what that was the case. (the inches at the bottom are just a rounded average of distance we got for each angle)

When we were done with our experiment, T mentioned that he was going to use this new information at his track & field practice when he throws his mini javelin so that he can throw it a longer distance. 

Some Elementary Geometry

I mentioned in a previous post about our love of Sir Cumference books. We read the Dragon of Pi book when we celebrated pi day last month. Yesterday, we read Sir Cumference and the Great Knight of Angleland as we talked about types of angles and triangles. We also introduced the protractor. There is a Montessori protractor that is sized to match the metal insets/fraction circles but we do not have one yet. T had fun learning how to use the regular protractor. The book uses a medallion as a protractor so T was excited to get his own. This book actually came with a small very thin plastic protractor but as its a library book we couldn't keep it.

(please click on any of the following photos and they will get larger, some of them may be difficult to see fully if you don't enlarge them)

We started our discussion with types of triangles.  Montessori Print Shop has a wonderful FREE printable of the seven types of triangles 3 part cards. He measured the angles of the triangles and we talked about right, acute and obtuse angles. We also talked about what isosceles and scalene meant. He matched the cards to their name and then compared them to the control cards.

T located each of the seven types of triangles in our geometry cabinet. You can see from the tray that there are only six triangles on the triangle tray in the cabinet. The last triangle (obtuse angled scalene triangle) is located in the last tray of the cabinet with the "extras".

After matching the triangles from the Geo cabinet, he tried his hand at the blue triangle constructive triangles box. This box contains two obtuse isosceles, two equilateral, three right angled scalene and one obtuse angled scalene triangles. 

Today we moved our focus to the angles. We talked about how right angles are always 90º, acute angles are always less than 90º and obtuse angles are always greater than 90º. T used these angle cards from Cultivating Dharma. There is a heading for each type of angle and five cards for each. He sorted them, measuring when he needed to.

There is a wonderful short lesson called The Story of Geometry. Don't worry, this isn't another Great Lesson. Its very short and simple. You don't really need any materials unless you would like to do the demonstration and then you only need some rope/string and a few weights/markers. 

The Story of Geometry gives the history of Geometry going back to the Egyptians. The Egyptians had trouble with flooding moving their markers for their farms and they used rope to fix their problem. There is a wonderful free version of this story at Montessori Commons that we used. This site doesn't have any photos so I also used a post from Making Montessori Ours where they did this lesson.

The Egyptians learned that if they always used sides of 3:4:5 in their triangles they would always make a right angled triangle. In our example we used 6" segments so one side was 3x6=18", then 4x6=24" and finally 5x6=30.

Later Pythagoras figured out why this worked and named it the Pythagorean Theorem.

We used the 3:4:5 for this triangle using inches so there was 3", 4" and 5" sides to this triangle. It made a right angled scalene triangle as it should have. Then we made each side a square and determined its area. I could tell I was losing T by this point so we pulled out our trusty bead squares. He immediately understood what the square of 3, 4, and 5 were. Then we added the beads from the 3 square to the beads of the 4 square and it did, indeed, equal the beads of the 5 square. T understood it but he was less than excited about it. I got a few looks because I was excited that he was learning some more interesting math. I love math but he thinks its a bit boring. This is just a foundation though, he will tuck this info in the back of his mind and will be able to pull it out later and understand it more easily. For now, I think we i'll just stick with measuring angles because he finds that fun.