Having done some of the basic experiments as part of the lesson pack following Archimedes and the door of science (book here) the children have also made the water clock, which is pretty simple to do. You need to make sure the pin holes in the paper cups are big enough for the water to drip though or time will stand still!
From there they have been learning about Archimedes experiments with number patterns. So we have been making triangle and square numbers and then cube and pyramid numbers. It was a good excuse to get out the bead material and the thousand cube box.
It’s a lovely way to see and present some mathematical concepts.
The children seem to get more out of the lessons when they can stop writing for a bit and make something.
Heleyna tends to join in with those bits as well, so she’s getting a bit of an introduction via the work her older siblings are doing.
The children are reading Archimedes and the Door of Science and then following along with this lesson pack on Archimedes. Along with some questions and mapwork and a little Greek there are some basic experiments looking at some of the rules Archimedes discovered.
Even though the book and lesson pack are aimed at children Ronan and Avila’s age the experiments can be done by younger children too so Heleyna joined in with them. The first one looks at buoyancy and viscosity. They filled a bowl with clear water and salt water, oil and syrup and then observed how the liquids separated. The they gathered some objects; marble, grape, cork and so on and dropped them into the bowl to see if they floated or sank and if they sank how far they sank. They were to write their observations. As a short extension we looked at emulsions. Mix the oil and water quite hard. Left to settle the oil and water separate again.
Then we make a hydrometer. A beaker is filled with “layers” again of water, sugar water, salt water, and cheap vodka (we have a bottle of cheap vodka for science of various kinds and for colour mixing for cake painting) Then take a test tube and fill it with beads, beans etc – cork the top and place it in the beaker and see how it behaves.
After that we filled the beaker to the top with water and looked at the curve the water makes at rest.
Finally we did the displacement experiment. We filled a beaker with water and put it inside another container. Then the children added marbles to the beaker and measured the water that spilled into the other container which told us the volume of the marbles we’d placed in the beaker.