Superheroes Week 4! Superheroes and Secret Identities! WHO WILL WIN!?!

Week 4, we revisited the world of superheroes with our aged 6-9 Superheroes! 

It was a fun-filled morning! We started with our craft!

Our craft for today was a superhero themed bookmark! I premade each bookmark by printing out some superhero (Justice League) themed colouring sheets and glueing them onto some construction paper and I added some ribbon as a tassel to the top of each bookmark!

The kids had fun picking out which superhero to colour!

I also left a blank white sheet of paper to the back of each bookmark so the kids could decorate the back, be it with their names, a pretty picture or what have you!

The kids took a lot of time to finish and perfect their respective bookmarks, which gave me plenty of time to take lots of pictures, which is always fun! ^_^

Since the kids were taking a lot of time to colour and decorate their bookmarks, I thought we could use a bit of an intermission with a story, so we went on to one of our stories for today! But before we read the actually book, we watched a quick trailer for the book we would be reading!

Check it out:

We then read Shark vs. Train by Chris Barton and Tom Lichtenheld, which has quickly become one of my favourite books this summer!

The story is about the possibilities that are made when a shark and train meet head to head! But what really decides the winner depends on what the battle is and where it takes place!

So essentially each page of the book and I made some signs for the kids to hold and every page they voted on the winner of the battle, either the train or the shark, or if it was decided that it was a tie they held their sign sideways!

The book itself is hilarious! And I think the kids had fun reading the book together! It was quite the epic battle! Fortunately, it all ended with a happy draw!

After the book we went back into finishing up our bookmarks!

^__^

After the bookmarks we read another story! And since I was fresh from watching the Wolverine the previous weekend (and since we were doing our superhero theme again!) I picked a new Wolverine story!!! The movie didn't quite follow the comic book canon, but it was still enjoyable! The book we read through was much closer the the usual Wolverine that I picture.

After our second story we went on to play a game of scavenger hunt! The premise for our scavenger hunt was that all the villains had come together to form a injustice league to fight against the superheroes, and as a result all the superheroes of the world had vanished! So the kids had to follow the clues in order to find and rescue the heroes!

It was loads of fun! I even found some activity sheets that were superhero themed and gave hints to the next clues location!

The superheroes did a great job in working together to find the clues! It was fantastic!

Week 4 - Science Week with the Young Professors

Scientist huddle around Tyler's experiment!

Mr. Scientist Chesney

I try to open each post with my favourite picture of the day, but from our Young Professors meeting today I had 2 favourites! The photo above of Cohen, Tyler and Cody playing with their rainbow of colours! and this photo below of a smiling Chesney!

WARNING - I took a lot of pictures, all week actually! The way I figure it, a photo is worth a thousand words right? Well prepare yourselves for an essay of photos :) 

So yesterday, Wednesday, July 25 (I can't believe July is almost over! :O) we had a fun-filled and busy-busy day at the library! As you probably heard this week is SCIENCE Week and boy what a week it was! 

Once we had everyone in the library (we had small numbers this week - 7 Young Professors in all) I asked the kids to do some story writing for me! Because... drum roll please .... 

The Beaver Valley Public Library is pleased to announce that this summer we will be holding a "Tell Me a Story: Strange ... But True? Story Writing Contest!". This Friday, July 27th, until August 10th we will be accepting fresh and unique stories (250 words and up, illustration are welcome!) that make us ask the question "is that story strange ... but true?". Fantastic, crazy, and amazing prizes are up for grabs for the winners! Age groups for our young authors will be as follows: 6-9, 10-12, and 13-15! For more information phone the library at 367-7114 or email Amanda at bvsrc2012@gmail.com!

Hurray! This is going to be awesome! So my little ones, you had better start thinking of a good story to write! Rhonda and I are scavenging around for some good prizes! We have lots of ideas and lots of books and medals to give away! 

So yesterday I talked to the kids about it and got them to write or pretend to write so that I could get some good pictures to send to the Trail Times - look in this Friday's edition or on Monday for our picture! :) 

Here are the pictures I got around to taking!

Jenna, Sydney, Cohen and Joshua

Jenna, Sydney and Cohen

Tyler, Chesney and Cody

Tyler, Chesney and Cody, writing away!

  

Smiles from Jenna, Sydney and Cohen

 After that we delved into the theme this week! Science!

We read through the book "Science Verse" by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, I talked a bit about this book back in a previous post! See that post here: http://beavervalleylibrarykids.blogspot.ca/2012/07/tgif-whats-happening-at-library-next.html

Anyways, we read through some of the crazy poems of "Science Verse" and then proceeded to talk about states of matter! SOLIDS, LIQUIDS AND GASES! woot!

The kids are such good listeners and super smart! They knew about everything! We played around and pretended to be water molecules, H2O, jumping around the room like a gas and then flowing around like liquid until we were standing still in a nice huddle like a big ice cube!

Then I went into the next activity our "experiment" with water and milk, food colouring and soap! Have you ever tried this before? It's lots of fun! ^_^

Let the science begin! With Sydney, Tyler, Chesney and Joshua. I love the look on Sydney's face! Priceless!

What I did is I had the kids gather around my big newspaper-covered table where I had two bowl-ish paper plates! Then I poured out onto one of my plates some water, while onto the other I poured 10% half and half cream! I asked the kids about what's the difference between the cream and the water and we talked about their colour difference, the smells (we practised our special scientist technique of sniffing, a gently wafting of the hands of the air to your nose) and the difference of taste (from memory). I pointed out that water, when zoomed up real close, like everything else around us, is made of small particles called atoms that form molecules!

A lot of us already knew the chemical name for water, H2O.

Once we had thought of all the differences we could think of I explained to the kids that a big differences between the two was that while milk is made up of water, it contains lots of vitamins, minerals and fat and that's what gives it its colour!

I took out my food colouring droppers and asked the kids what they think would happen when I added food colouring into the water. Most of us guessed that it would spread out and fan throughout that plate. Which is indeed what happened! I told them that this process of movement within the molecules was called diffusion and that we experience diffusion a lot - especially when someone sprays perfume into the room! Eventually the whole room is filled with the perfume smell!

So into my water I added my food colouring drops and we watched as a lovely rainbow started to form with the more colours I added into the solution. Now I asked the kids what would happen to the food colouring when dropped into the cream!

Now here the food colouring didn't diffuse quite as effectively as it did in the water, but I did have a twist in mind!

I tried to explain how soap works to the kids, I'm not sure I explained it well, but the demonstation probably helped in explaining it more. But essentially, soap is made up of particles that have a hydrophilic (water loving) and hydrophobic (does not mix with water). Since grease, fats and dirt are made of hydrophobic particles, they don't mix easily into water. Therefore soap acts as a gateway into getting fat mixed into water so that it could be easily washed away! Thank you soap! Making doing the dishes easier since ... well for a long time.

Tyler testing the effects of soap in milk as Chesney and Joshua observe!

So that being said, when soap was added into their milk with the food colouring made some crazy motions! If you haven't tried this before ... and you should! it's real easy! ... the milk looks like its stirring or making ripple effects without you really doing anything to it! If your patient enough and hold a q-tip of soap into an area of the milk eventually you get a lovely firework of colours!

Cohen and Sydney.

The kids really enjoyed it! Everyone used fantastic spectrums of colours and mounds of soap! The kids did love added more and more colours to their concoctions and fairly soon their plates had amassed into a puddle of "swamp mix" as the kids liked to call it!

Here are some more pictures of the kids enjoying their science activity!

Cohen and Sydney

Cody and Chesney! Cody's milk rainbow!

o . O

Group Huddle!

Watching some science at work!

:O

In this picture you can see the two big plates that I made for our demonstration! On the left side is a plate of water, where the food colouring quickly diffused and made a lovely mix of colours! I showed the kids the water and food colouring reacting to a q-tip of soap and alas nothing really happened! Besides the slight tilted of the plate on the table causes for some shifting of the colours in the plate.

To the right of my big water coloured plate is my very own plate full of milk and swirls of colours!

Sydney and Tyler.

Unfortunately, I had once again over planned my session with the Young Professors! But the kids really enjoyed the milk experiment so I thought it best to spend our time focusing on the milk and colours! I think perhaps next week I will continue with a science theme and use the leftover activities I had planned for our next visit!

Smiling Chesney!

That being said I did have some time to talk about the classic equal parts cornstarch and water mixture: Oobleck! (a term coined by the great Dr. Suess!) The kids really enjoyed it! And that brought us to a close for our Wednesday morning Young Professors' Summer Reading Club! (We than had the afternoon to look forward to! with our Guest Wednesday being Dr. Allyson Perrott from Selkirk College! Awesome!)

Happy Reading you guys! Sorry again for posting this a little later than expected! I'm actually on my holiday for the weekend! :) So as I type this I'm down in Vancouver restraining myself from buying too many books at Chapters and breathing in the sweet sweet smell of coffee, although for now I think I'll go with a nice glass of water! Enjoy the weekend! I'm going to try to get my Guest Wednesday post posted today! We shall see if that's possible!  I'm in the process of uploading the pictures for that post, and let me warn ya! There's a lot of pictures coming up! 

Here's a link to a great online blog that discusses this "experiment" in more detail: http://www.cometogetherkids.com/2012/02/swirling-colors-milk-science-experiment.html

and if you're still itching for more information about our swirling milk experiment, here's another great website: http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/experiment/milk-color-explosion

TGIF! What's Happening at the Library Next Week?

Oh boy! Next week is going to be heaps of fun, loads of hilarity and mounds of chaos! That's right, next week - Week 4 of the Summer Reading Club - is SCIENCE WEEK! Or perhaps, more appropriately titled "Weird Science - Strange Physics, Cool Chemistry, and Crazy Inventions!", but like the Discovery Channel's "Shark Week" and like Shakespeare's age old adage "brevity is the soul of wit", I prefer "Science Week!" - either way its much easier to remember and way shorter!

So to go along with our "Science Week" this week, we have a very special Guest Wednesday! That's right folks, this week we will be graced with the presence of scientific genius in Selkirk College's Professor of Chemistry - Allyson Perrott! 

I just graduated from Selkirk this past Spring, so therefore I was lucky enough to have had Allyson as a teacher quite a few times! She's a fantastic lecturer, an enthusiastic teacher and a great role model. She has a firm philosophy in teaching her students to understand and question what their learning rather than simply memorizing their textbooks and blindly following a teacher's words. 

Having read an excerpt from "The Phantom Tollbooth" by Norton Juster to the Mad Scientists this week, we met the character of Milo, a young boy who is horribly uninterested in everything. Juster wrote on the first page about Milo saying: "since no one bothered to explain otherwise, he [Milo] regarded the process of seeking knowledge as the greatest waste of time of all." I think had Milo had a teacher like Allyson, he would definitely be thinking otherwise

So here is a copy of the poster I made this week to advertise Allyson's visit! Be sure to register guys!

Guest Wednesday Poster! July 25, 2012

Allyson has already planned out the experiments we will be conducting on Wednesday afternoon and let me just say it's going to be very very awesome! I'll give you some foreshadowing: red cabbages, silver and slime! See what you can make of that!


So .... what else is happening this week? Well, I heard through the grapevine that Mrs. Giles has lots of fun planned for the Little Einsteins on Tuesday morning! For those little guys' theme of the week they will be reading lots of stories and crafts about picnics and ants! Should be lots of fun!
Now, I'm still in the process of planning out our program for next week! My head is full of too many ideas! But I'm pretty sure we may have a couple of fun and refreshing experiments to study next week! 
I've also been on the hunt for good science-y books to read with the Young Professors and Mad Scientists! It's tricky to find a fiction book for kids that goes with science, so we may be reading a few non-fiction books! I'm also thinking about continuing to read "The Phantom Tollbooth" with the Mad Scientists since its a really fun book to read! 

I did find a cool book at the Crockett Book Company in the Waneta Mall a couple weeks ago! A friend of mine and I went out to the mall in sad lament of the rumored closing of Trail's last and only bookstore! (we also went because of the mass sales opportunities for awesome books!) And I found a great Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith book called "Science Verse" which seems like lots of fun! While I was a bit perturbed with its totally misunderstanding of the theory of evolution (I have my Biology and Anthropology college teachers to blame for teaching me to be aware of common misconceptions of evolution) but I realized that this book isn't supposed to be a college textbook, but rather a fun and silly book about science! And hilarious it is! So good in fact, that I interlibrary loaned the prequel to "Science Verse" called "Math Curse" which is just as silly! 

A page from Math Curse by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith

Anyways, long story short (too late), this week we were surprised to hear that the Crockett Book Company is indeed not closing! HURRAY! So please surport our local bookstore and visit their website: http://www.crockettbookco.com/

Also, in my quest to find awesome ideas for science experiments, I have become addicted to YouTube videos! And of course, the classics, like the Magic School Bus and Bill Nye the Science Guy!