Need science experiment ideas for the summer

[conuly]

Also, art projects that aren't all either "Uh, here are some supplies, get messy" or "These are the carefully cut out parts, please make yours exactly like mine". Gosh, I hate the latter. I want all teachers of young children to memorize the phrase "it's the process, not the product" and apply it religiously.

Anyway, trying to do some fun and lightly educational things over the summer to make up for forcing Eva to do - gasp! - math every day. (The math is not optional.)

Comments

[kengr]

Well, at that age, there's a lot of chemistry she'd probably be safe messing around with if she's interested.

When I was in 6th grade (1966) they were trying the new math and what got me to look at math in a new light was messing with different number bases. I wound up drawing up addition, subtraction, multiplication and division "tables" for bases 1 thru 12. and discovered some interesting patterns.

Also, if you can track down copies, Isaac Asimov's "Realm of Numbers" clued me in on a lot of stuff they don't usually tell you about math.

His "Realm of Algebra" got me over the hurdles I was having with that.

[larryhammer]

I also had fun playing with number bases in 6th grade, as well as exploring properties of Pythagorean triangles (triplets where x² + y² = z², such as 3-4-5 and 5-12-13).

(For exploring Pythagorean triplets, it helps to understand how to generate successive squares by adding the next largest odd number. So, 8² = 7² + 15, 9² = 8² + 17, and so on -- you can easily prove this on squared-grid graph paper.)

[conuly]

Will definitely try that with the kiddos

[larryhammer]

Forgot to link to this.

[kengr]

One of the fun things I discovered with different bases is that the pattern you see for the 9x part of a multiplication table (09, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, 63, 72, 81, 90) holds for the base-1 row of multiplication tables in all bases.

I know I saw some other interesting patterns, but that's the only one I recall after 50 years.

[larryhammer]

The pattern for the 11x row also replicates in the base+1 row, IIRC.