Today was another fun day of Summer School. I'm really getting the hang of this multi-age group thing. And today was Race Day, the day we've been working toward all week! I'm pretty sure that I was just as excited as the kids (maybe more). After spending the school year so focused on our state standards of learning and standardized testing, it is such a breath of fresh air to educate (and learn) without all of the pressure.
Yesterday I posted about the planning and designing steps the students took to prepare for today. You can read about how we estimated and measured our aluminum foil, and designed and created our boats here.
Today we had several contests. First we raced our empty boats in a plastic box with a few inches of water. (I wish I'd thought ahead to purchase a kiddie pool instead, since the width of the box was not quite large enough.) We learned quite a bit about "wind direction" too, as the hardest "winds" (made by the students blowing air toward their boats) often capsized the boats. One of the first grade students said, "I blow gently to get my boat going and then I hit it hard to win."
Our next contest tested our boats to see how much "cargo" they could hold.
CONFESSION TIME: The goal was to see which boat could carry the most money, since we've been counting money this week, but I left my coins at home. We used plastic Bingo chips instead.
Most of the boats sunk with only a few Bingo chips; only three could carry more than five Bingo chips.
The last set of races occurred after each boat was loaded with two Bingo chips. We raced small groups and then raced the winners of each small group.
We discussed what we'd learned about our boats and then prizes were awarded. The candy was definitely the most valued prize. Tomorrow we will be building towers. I can't wait to see how this activity goes. I'll be sure to let you know!
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