Story time with Mrs. Giles! These kids are absolutely adorable!
So this Tuesday the Little Einsteins had lots of fun stretching their imaginations as the theme this week for the little ones was DRAGONS!!!!
Rhonda started things off as per usual with the Name Box and some classic songs!
For stories she read through some dragon books! She also read "Sophie and the Sea Monster" by Don Gillmor and illustrated by Michael Martchenko (known to me as the awesome guy who illustrates a lot of Robert Munsch books!
This is such a cute story and hearing Rhonda read it in such an animated and fun way was awesome! The kids enjoyed it immensely - as did I! It has become a favourite of mine this week, as I took it out to read to the Young Professors and Mad Scientists - who loved it just the same!
Along with that, Rhonda had set up her felt board and did a lovely rendition of 5 little monkeys, re-warped into 5 little dragons! The kids sand along and had a blast!
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!
Last week we had a great Guest Wednesday to add to the fantastic group of Guests we've had all summer! Last week's guest? David DeRosa from Cominco!
David is an avid bug finder and biology-nut! And today he shared with us some lovely samples of local creeks and marshes, in which some crazy critters were found!
David brought lots of tools and nick-nacks for the kids to explore the waters with! The kids loved it! We ewwwwwed and awwwwwed and macawed like cray-cray.... fish!
Here's some of our early birds going at 'er with some magnifying glasses and such!
Once we had all our Young Professors, Mad Scientists, guests and drop-in friends settled into the library and off exploring, we got everyone gathered and settled and David shared his adventures and travels into his field of study: bugs!
David spoke of the early spark of his interest in bugs as a kid bug-watching and net-building. He showed us some examples of the fantastic and easy-made nets that can be made at home with odds and ends. Dip one of these guys into some outdoor water source and get yourself a nice lovely bunch of bugs and such!
After his short presentation we were let lose again to explore the samples so generously brought in by David! Here's some pictures of that action!
Our theme this week - WATER! Good ol' H2O! AW YEAH!
Some of our Young Professors! Studying the capillary action of water! Although in this picture, Cohen looks more like a Young Superhero!
So last week I was so inspired and had enjoyed Science Week so much that I thought ... lets make Science Week a biweekly event. Soooooo..... Science DosWeek? Two Weeks of Science? Biweek sounds weird, like a tiny little bicycle thats too weak to carry anything ... So I just went with Water Week, when in doubt go with some alliteration! It'll lift your spirits ten-fold!
So Water Week commenced on a spritely and well organized pace! We had the joy of the Young Professors on Wednesday morning, who graced us with their presence and sound mind! The yells of H2O!!!! echoed throughout our library and I was thankful that we have our children's program before we open the library to the public! Although I'm sure Marie, our library director, and Nicole were not amused by our ruckus!
Nevertheless, 'twas a fine morning to bask in the miraculousness of water! Last week, during our Guest Wednesday, Allyson shared the Strange ... But True facts about water! She talked about ice floating in water and how used to it we must be, when in fact its CRAZY! Solids usually sink in their liquid form, right? It makes sense! Solid = dense and compactly sorted molecules that move slightly or vibrarte in place and Liquid = flowing spaced out molecules that fill their container. So you would think a solid would sink, but with ice in water, it floats! And thank goodness for that! Allyson explained to us the characteristics of water that lead to H-bonding and the crystalline-like spacing of water as it freezes into ice and how that also lends to the lovely shapes of snowflakes!
She also explained how vital floating ice is to our aquatic ecosystems and the world. With floating ice, lakes generally freeze on the surface, leaving fish underneath, still able to swim around! If water sunk when frozen than the tops of lake would freeze in the winter and sink to the bottom of the lake, wrecking havoc on marine life! Also if this occurred in our oceans, icebergs and frozen masses would sink and inevitability mean that the water levels would rise dramatically leaving little to no exposed land on the earth! Whew, TLDR --> floating ice is a strange, but good thing.
Thank you H-bonds!
So, we started our Wednesday morning talking about water's ability to DEFY GRAVITY!!! - insert Wicked music here - well its not as dramatic as I like make it out to be, but it is quite necessary for plant-life and therefore all life!
With the kids, we talked about watering plants and how their roots absorb the water in the soil, be it from rain or from us watering them! But how is it that water from the soil makes it to the tip-top tops of plants? especially if we think about the tall redwood trees or high reaching trees! The answer? capillary action!
To demonstrate water's gravity defying abilities I place one cup full of blue water atop a pedestal, or in this case a box of food colouring and then beside it on the table I placed an empty cup. To connect the two empty and water filled cups I took a piece of paper towel and placed it into one cup and into the other (see picture below). Almost immediately as I stuck the paper towel into the cup full of water the water slowly began its ascent up the paper towel! --> capillary action!
The capillary action of water in action!
Now, one special characteristic of water is its cohesiveness among its molecules, this is due to water molecules inherent polarity that is due to the electrostatic differences across the negatively charged oxygen atom and positively charged hydrogen atoms, because of this charge separation, water molecules have a positive side and a negative side, resulting in a polar molecule. And as we generally learn in our physics classes when we talk about charges, or if we are scrounging around on plentyoffish looking for our one true love, we know that OPPOSITES ATTRACT! So water molecules have a large affinity to fit together with their positive sides to negative sides of another water molecule, resulting in a high cohesion force (the ability of like substances to cling to each other) among water molecules to stay together.
A fine example of how water beads up due to COHESION! on non-polar material, like leaves.
You can really observe this cohesion of water molecules, when you place some water on wax paper and how immediately the water beads up into sort of spherical droplets rather than spreading out. These sphere-like droplets form from the attraction among the water molecules and results naturally in sphere shapes, since they have the smallest possible surface area to volume ratio.
Now in the terms of our paper towel in the water experiment what we see between our two cups, its this cohesion between the water molecules that allow for a string of water to slowly climb the paper towel. Its this action that also occurs in plants that allows for water to travel up a tree trunk or flower stem!
String of water molecules travelling up
a plant! H-bonds!
So the water in our paper towel moved along the tiny gaps in the fibre of the paper towel, this is due to the adhesive force (the clinging between two dissimilar substances - in this case the paper towel and water) that allows for the water to slowly climb the paper towel, and eventually start to fill the empty cup where the paper towel ends!
Although I didn't go into huge detail about the hydrogen bonding and cohesion/adhesion forces at work, the Young Professors were enthralled in coming back to watch the water climbing in between our activities for the day! Although I must say, the paper towel we used today worked wonders and the water moved quite quickly!
Here are some of the boys checking out the capillary action of water! Huzzah!
Chesney, Elijah, Cody and Cohen (and some parts of Tyler and an eye of Zoe!) looking a bit bewildered by water!
After this we had a quick story time with one of my favourite people, Mr. Hank Green, I took an excerpt from this great Crash Course video about water! In the video, Hank tells the story of an eccentric scientist named Henry Cavendish, who was a scientific genius/madman, who pre-discovered many scientific laws and made groundbreaking discoveries about the composition of water, in a time when people thought water was an element in itself!
Watch the video here in its entirety! The part we watched was from 5:50 - 7:56, although we did indulge ourselves to watch a few more bits and pieces!
The Little Einsteins, flying their planes, being led by their pilot Rhonda!
This Tuesday we had a lovely group of Little Einsteins! Rhonda planned out a day of high-flying and safe landings as their theme this week was Airplanes!
Rhonda picked out lots of awesome books to read, including a great Robert Munsch book and sang a selection of songs with the kids!
They also played airplane acting games! Here's some pictures of the kids pretending to be airplanes in the sky and playing games with Rhonda!
Be sure to click the read more link to see the rest of this post and see all the cute pictures!
Group shot! (From left): Jillian, Serena, Justice, Chase, Alicen, Kyleen and Sara! Our MAD SCIENTISTS!
Oho! A whole week late, here, finally, is my Mad Scientist post for last week's Summer Reading Club meeting! Our theme you ask? SCIENCE! :D
Last week was loads of fun, fresh off from the Guest Wednesday the previous afternoon, with Allyson, lots of the kids were excited to continue our adventures through the world of science!
I also need to thank my friend Teresa! I asked her at the beginning of summer about any cool science-y activities/experiments for kids and she whipped this right out of her memories from Science World! Awesome! Science World is like the Disneyland of science!
Here's a few links to some websites that talk more about this activity!
Here are some pictures of the Mad Scientists enjoying their milk rainbows!
Brothers Justice and Chase!
Misses Kyleen and Serena
A close up on Serena's green milk explosion.
The ladies' table
The boys' table! So spacious!
Here's my demonstration plates! The left is a beautiful representation of diffusion in water and the left is my milk plate, the colours disrupted by a dab of soap!
We then moved on to talking about different states of matter: solids, liquids and gases! We talked about the differences between the three states and then I posed a demonstration for the kids! I showed a tank of water and we all were familiar with its movements: how it fills the container its placed in, how it reacts to outside forces, how it bends and flows and its viscosity - a liquid's measured thickness or resistance to flow in a fluid. It is a fine example of a newtonian fluid! Newton proposed that a liquid's viscosity is directly related to temperature, and that is what we can observe in newtonian fluids! For example, honey and ketchup are both thick liquids that flow slowly. But when you heat honey up it flows more easily and therefore cold honey is more viscous than warm honey!
After investigating or tub of water, I brought out my tub of cornstarch mixture! It also goes my the name oobleck and is made of 1.5 parts cornstarch to 1 part water, and mixed up very well!
This cornstarch mixture is a strange and fun way to learn about non-newtonian fluids! These fluids act strange in that they act like a solid at times and a liquid at other times! Where a newtonian fluid, like water, moves and flows away when an outside forces pushes against it, a non-newtonian fluid instead of moving, solidifies and stiffens like a solid! Here the molecules of the mixture react to the outside pressure and move closer together, almost like moving into a crystalline structure! And then almost immediately after the pressure is taken away, the non-newtonian fluid goes back to flowing like a liquid! This is a great example of a non-newtonian fluid, because here the fluid changes its viscosity when stress or a force is applied! - not when heat is applied, as was the case with a newtonian fluid.
For me, the best way to demonstrate this is when you punch a tub full of the oobleck - as I showed the kids! I (gently) punched my tub of water to show the water moves and flows away, while causing a bit of a splash. Then I punched the oobleck and rather than my fist going through the liquid it bounced of a rigid surface!
Before I unleashed the Mad Scientists into the ooze and globs of cornstarch, I asked them to watch a video that explains oobleck very well! One of my all-time favourite authors, John Green, is an avid YouTuber and started a vlogchannel with his brother Hank Green.
You can check out a couple of John's books out here at the library: "Paper Towns" and a short story in the compilation book "Geektastic".
Anyways, I love the Green Brothers, they are great people. And John's brother, Hank, is an accomplished environmental science blogger. Nowadays, John and Hank have started a new creation of online education videos that are both entertaining and extremely educational! So for the Mad Scientists we watched one of Hank's videos talking about non-newtonian fluids!
I'll post it here if you'd like to take a look at it!
The kids really liked this video, I think the best thing I heard all week came from Justice who said "That guy is even better than Bill Nye the Science Guy!" ... Now I don't know if Hank is BETTER than good ol' Bill but they are definitely two amazing and awesome people!
