Week 5 - Water Week! with the Mad Scientists!!

Today's group shot - check out these Mad Scientists! They be cray-ze!

Oho! A whole week late! Here's what we did last week with the Mad Scientists!

We had lots of fun! We watched for the capillary action of water, water bending, and watched the Hank Green video like the Young Professors! We also continued on our Water Week journey by playing with some waterbeads, which I swear, these Mad Scientists would be content playing with these waterbeads hours on end!

Waterbeads! AW YEAH!

Alicen, Haley and Emily playing with some waterbeads!

Sara, (Chloe behind her!), Caleb, Justice and Chase - barely seen! and Kyleen!

Oh! And we were also informed by Miss Emily that Kyleen's birthday was coming up so we sang some impromptu Happy Birthday Songs! :)

I read to them a story from the book: The Kid Who Named Pluto - and the Stories of Other Extraordinary Young People in Science by Marc McCutcheon. What a fantastic book! Its a compilation of stories of young people discovering and creating things to do with science! I had to interlibrary loan it so unfortunately we don't have it here in Beaver Valley, but do look for it elsewhere! Or even come and interlibrary loan it here, like me!

 We read the story about Venetia Burney, who at the age of 11, suggested the name of Pluto to name the newly found Planet X in 1930!

There are many more stories in the book, of which I would have liked to read with the kids, yet alas! time is always of importance and unfortunately the hour we spend together goes by like lightning!

We ended playing some games! And of course by passing out some waterbeads for the kids to take home! Awesome!

Happy Reading!

Week 3 - It Came from Outer Space with the Young Professors

It Came from Outer Space!!!!!

This morning we welcomed the Young Professors back into the library! We had 10 Professors today: Zoe, Ava, Sydney, Tyler, Joshua, Cohan, Cody, Chloe, Paige, and Chesney!

We started off talking about our theme for the week! This week's theme: It Came from Outer Space, meant that today we were going to venture out into space and talk about aliens, planets, and astronomy!

To begin everyone was given a rocket ship name tag! The name tag had a space that said "My name is ______________ From the planet of ___________________" 

Here, we made up our alien names for our name tags by taking the first 3 letters of our first names and adding it with the first 3 letters of our last names! Mine was a pretty horrible sounding name "Amapou"! But the kids seemed to find it funny! We had some great alien sounding names though! Some like "AvaJin", "ZoeGil", "TylMcN", "JosFri", and "ChesFlu". 

What are name tags looked like!

After completing our name tags we all gathered on the tarp area and talked about Science Fiction books in the library! We talked about what sort of things you would find in a science fiction book! Things like time-travel, space-travel, science, aliens, futuristic technology and so on! We also talked about fiction books and non-fiction books and where to find them in the library!

Next we looked at some photos from the great Hubble Telescope! The kids enjoyed looking at the photos!

We talked about NASA and astronauts and played a game pretending to be astronauts and moving in 0 g gravity! Here they had to try to spin around, sitting in a rolling chair without using their feet or arms to touch the ground or without pushing off the ground! 

Here are some pictures of us playing this game!

Astronaut Sydney working her way through 0 g