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

[siderea]

You know how you hate art projects of the form "These are the carefully cut out parts, please make yours exactly like mine"?

I feel exactly that way about people treating arts and crafts as activity projects. I think "it's the process, not the product" applies to the craft itself, too.

I'd recommend that if you, personally, have an art or craft that you enjoy doing and have some knowledge of, then you should share that with the girls. Or if you, personally, have an art or craft that you've always wanted to learn, here's an opportunity to learn it along side the girls.

And if you don't, maybe find somebody who does, who is doing something the girls would enjoy, and have them instruct – and induct – the girls in that?

Because anything else winds up feeling like "build a house out of popsicle sticks", which, to me at least, felt like the simalacrum of art or craft: I was keenly aware as a child that this wasn't giving me access to skills and abilities and expressive creative activities I would have enjoyed, it was in lieu of those things, and I was enormously bitter about those sorts of "art projects".

Things I enjoyed involved didactic instruction that empowered me to use new skills to go express myself creatively.

Gotta run, ride here. Could say more if you're interested.

I should probably feel the same way about "science projects".

[conuly]

I should probably feel the same way about "science projects".

I'm schlepping around extra kids. I think Eva and her friends just want to see things explode, but without actual explosions or danger.

[siderea]

Explosions are good. :)

ETA: There's no reason not to each chemistry to 6th graders, so long as the students have the pre-algebra notion of adding or subtracting things from both sides of an equation. My father introduced me to the Bohr model and the notion of electron shells when I was, like, 10. Considering how much of chemistry is memorization of words, it might be easier younger.

Okay, there's no reason except that they might use it to blow things up. But, really now, they teach this stuff to 16yos.

ETA2: I was gonna say, "Really, the concepts of endothermic and exothermic reactions aren't rocket science" but then realized, oh yes they precisely are, aren't they.

[conuly]

ETA2: I was gonna say, "Really, the concepts of endothermic and exothermic reactions aren't rocket science" but then realized, oh yes they precisely are, aren't they.

The very definition of rocket science, in fact.