Working with Homefront

For the past month or so I have been going down to a summer camp for underprivileged kids to run science activities. It's a really nice place. They spend the morning working on academic things (one day I saw some kids playing math basketball!), and in the afternoon they do more typical summer camp activities like arts and crafts. So I got to come in as a "bonus" academic activity. I took took the kids in smaller groups.

Fun with Glurch

Every time I went I got a different age group.  I first had the teens, then 5th and 6th graders, 3rd and 4th graders, and then the kindergarten through 2nd graders. The first four times I went, I did pretty much the same activity set I did with my other afterschool program. The experiments were matter themed - first we did chromatography and talked about what molecules are and the fact that they move around. Next, we made Glurch and discussed its different properties, and why each one ended up slightly different (because I don't have time to accurately measure the ingredients, so it's all estimating). With the Oobleck, we could talk about states of matter. The straws didn't really relate to the matter theme, but we used them to teach about sound. And it was a nice, not too messy way to wrap up.

I feel that as the groups got younger and younger, they got more enthusiastic. This supports my hypothesis that as kids get older they gradually get "turned off" from science because of the way it is taught. So I am hoping that by going there to do the activities, I may have raised the interest level of at least a few kids.

I of course also had to lower the level of the explanations as the groups got younger. In general, the younger the group was, the fewer new terms I would introduce. So with Oobleck for example, I would talk about how it flowed less as a pushed on it more, but I didn't call it a shear-thickening fluid with the younger groups, I only described it. In addition, for the youngest group we turned chromatography into a demo. Mainly because their head counselor thought they would draw all over themselves if we actually gave them the markers. So instead, we dotted the ink onto the paper towel strips ahead of time and just had them dip it into the water.

Working with them was a lot of fun, so I decided to go back twice more. This time I made a weather-themed activity set. I'll try and give more details later, but here's the basic outline:

• A thermometer made from a water bottle. Fill with water, put a straw in it and seal around the opening. If you then put it in warm water (or even hold it) the water will move up the straw acting like a thermometer.

Cloud identifier from Full of Great Ideas.

• Freeze some blue water. Then fill a shoebox sized container with warm water. Put the blue ice in one end and some red food coloring in the other. Eventually the red color will stay on the top and the blue will move to the bottom, illustrating different densities and convection currents.

• Tornado bottles! The easier version is just a dash of glitter and some dish soap in a 3/4 full clear bottle. Spin it around and a mini tornado will form. The other version involves attaching two bottles mouth to mouth with a washer in between. Fill one up with water first! Flip it up and rotate it to form a waterspout.

• And finally a cloud identifier. They cut it out, and I passed out some sample pictures of clouds to identify. This one they could take home.

We also used these to talk about density a lot. Especially because the one with the ice took a bit of sitting there waiting for the ice to melt. I feel as the kids weren't quite as engaged with this set of activities, probably because it was less hands on. They made the cloud identifiers, and I passed around the easier glitter tornado, but there wasn't much they could get their hands on like with Oobleck and Glurch. I couldn't even pass around the two-bottle water spout because it was too fragile (don't try to use tacky glue. It does not work well with water). So I plan to work on making the activities more interactive. If anyone has any suggestions on this, please comment and share them!