Exciting Experiments
I talked briefly about the experiments available but the are a lot more than we were able to complete during the review period. The experiments provided for both Fluid Dynamics and Sounds all sound so wonderful and engaging.
Each experiment is its own PDF which you can use digitally or print off. There is also a quiz to encourage the student to talk about the experiments they did.
We started our second week by selecting some experiments. We could choose from a smorgasbord of 17 different projects, which varied in length from 10 minutes to 2 hours. Since long, involved, and messy experiments which require hard-to-find supplies completely intimidate me, I was glad to find many manageable options on the list.
One of the activities is Experiments. There are so many experiments to choose from. There are ideas for every learning level. One of my favorite parts is that most of them use products that you can easily find around the house. If you have a kid who loves experiments, they can do as many as they want!
Besides the videos, there are many other suggested activities. There are a lot of options for experiments. I somehow neglected to get any pictures of my boys trying out the match-head rockets, but they spent several days playing around with them. They had loads of fun building and shooting off these miniature rockets, and Mr. Intellectual discovered a new-to-us YouTube channel full of fun experiments.
On days we landed on an experiment day, we had a seemingly endless supply of experiment choices. Sometimes we just picked one and other times several.
Both kids did come together for a few things like an experiment. They weren’t on the same lesson with the experiments but my kids don’t mind when it comes to an experiment.
The experiments are, for the most part, simple to use. There were some experiments that required more materials than I wanted to purchase. I enjoyed that there were a wide variety of experiments that they could do, which allowed me to avoid purchasing those extra materials.
Their favorite experiment was definitely the one with the blow-dryer/leaf blower and the toilet paper. While we couldn’t convince anyone to let us try the trick with the leaf blower, we were able to get the hair dryer to work a little bit.
In addition to the video and worksheets, the curriculum also had sections that include research ideas and experiment projects. We found some great ideas for experiments that reinforced the material learned in the lesson.
We really wanted to do more of the experiments then we had the opportunity to do but due to our location, we were unable to obtain some very basic items. This wasn’t due to the curriculum or for the materials required being rare – just that they weren’t items available on our base.
Example – there was a really neat experiment to create a microphone using pencil graphite, alligator clips, a battery, headphones and a matchbox. I was able to obtain everything except a box of matches. Another cool experiment was creating a record player – but we could not get access to a vinyl record. However, we had a lot of fun watching videos of record players and how they work. We did, however, have fun making the string phones.
There are many experiments to pick from. My kids love experiments!!! We are in a crazy busy season right now, so we haven’t actually done the experiments yet, but we have talked about them and what the outcome would be and why.
There are plenty of experiments to try, because what is science without experiments? We are working towards this one, the RV airplane, because My husband just happens to love airplanes, flying, and building RC planes. He just bought a foam plane for this purpose- Perfect timing!
The experiment journal note pages are colorful, and chock full of information, which can be used in writing the research paper.
There are several experiments and you, as the teacher/parent, can assign as many of the experiments as you wish. I loved that there were links to videos to show how to do the activities or run the experiments making it easier for some children to work through the lessons on their own. I just needed to make sure we had the required items which are listed right on the experiment page.
On the experiments page, I love that they give great ideas and in the ideas, they give the links to show how to do it from other YouTubers. Which is great because my kids are hooked on YouTube.
There is also opportunity for experiments. There are many to choose from, placed strategically between the videos. Depending on your child’s age and grade level as well as your resources, the parent/teacher can decide which experiments are the best fit for their situation.
The kids really enjoyed the hands-on science experiments. One that really stands out is the boat experiment where they got to make their own little boats.
There are also tons of experiments that they are still really looking forward to trying out, one of them being the fish dissection. We are definitely excited to keep on digging!
Since I am not one to grade based on test results, I loved the hands-on experiments from this site as well. I love seeing the physical creations from the experiments and listening to my son talk about what he had learned.
You can print out any of the experiment sheets which have all the supplies and directions on how and what to do to complete it. What my son REALLY wants to do is raise 10 freshwater or saltwater fish.