Stuffed Animal Bumper Cars

One of my goals for the rest of this school year is to do more fun projects with my kids.  Participating in the Virtual Book Club for Kids is a great way to motivate myself. This month the club featured books by Laura Numeroff. We read, "If you Give a Pig a Party."

My children were curious about the bumper cars, since they have never ridden any. I don't expect that we'll have the opportunity to enjoy bumper cars any time soon, so we made some bumper cars, for their stuffed animals.

I told them each to pick 3 animals, then design a car for them.  They had a great time searching through the project materials saved from our clean trash to design their cars.  

When each of the stuffed annals had a car, I demonstrated how bumper cars ram into one another. 

I think this activity connects nicely to the Next Generation Science Standard:

K-PS2-2.	Analyze data to determine if a design solution works as intended to change the speed or direction of an object with a push or a pull.*

I tried to ask some questions about different sizes of cars impacting each other differently and collisions with different speeds. They tried out a few different kinds of collisions,  but were not interested in pausing the fun to reflect.  Maybe next time, they made me promise to save the cars for another day.

Click here to check out more great activities to go with Laura Numeroff's books.

What to do with a box: Nature Museum

  We were living on an island up in Washington a couple years ago, when my sister gave my son a copy of  Animal Habitats by Judy Press.  This book information and some crafts to go with each of the common North American habitats.  I consider myself craft challenged, so this was a great gift, especially since she sent quite a few of the materials with it.    We worked with water habitats right away, and as we moved around the country have made a collages featuring our local habitats in each new home.

Read more at Thriving STEM.

Toy Car Distance Investigation

The final activity in my Toy Car Physics! unit is an experiment involving force and resulting distance on a toy car.  To be frank, this was a little bit of stretch for my three and five-year-olds.  They did enjoy it though, and got some great practice with numbers.

We tried out two apparatuses.  My son used his hotwheels launcher.  This approach requires that the student basically understand the force of gravity. Many kids do by kindergarten, but for those who do not, it would create an unnecessary hassle.  The key is to understand that by launching the cars from lesser heights, you are limiting the time that gravity has to exert the force, therefore there is "less force" on the car. To be precise, you would say that there is less work done by the force.

My daughter used a rubber band powered launcher created by my husband.   It consists of two screws in a board.  We were able to add more and more rubber bands in order to exert more and more force on the car. The results were nicely quantifiable.

However, before we started anything, they had to make their predictions.  I wrote down their verbal hypothesis, and they drew pictures of the effects of little and big pushes.

Each child had the opportunity to launch the cars with three different sized forces.  Then, we measured the distance between the launch point and the point where the car stopped.  For us, this was a fun way to practice reading numbers larger than twenty.

As we worked, we recorded data in the pre-made data table.  When we were finished, we moved it to a graph. 

 We obtained very nice results with both set ups.  By nice, we I mean that when more force was used, more distance was achieved.  That was the standard result and the physics concept I was hoping to reinforce.

This wraps up my Toy Car Physics!  unit.   I hope it gives you some ideas about what can be done to meet some of these science objectives.  If you would like access to these hand outs or more detailed information about how these activities line up with Next Generation Science Standards or Common Core, please click here to download the file from my TpT store.

Learning science is naturally fun for most kids, because it requires them to do the same things they would naturally do when playing with toys.  As a mom, I love to enjoy life with my kids.  As a physics teacher, I appreciated every bit of groundwork that was laid before students walked into my classroom.   Admittedly, my experience in teaching science to large groups of elementary students is limited, so if you are an experienced classroom teacher with observations or concerns about how the activities in this unit would work in a standard class, I would love to have your input.

Toy Car Negative Acceleration Investigation Demonstration (Slowing down cars and showing my students how to do an experiment.)

This activity has two goals.  First, to demonstrate the idea of a force that causes negative acceleration, also known as deceleration or slowing down.   The second purpose was to model the concept of how to do a data chart with numbers, and how to graph numeric data. My children's response startled me.

The set up calls for markers, arranged in a line, and a toy car.  I rolled the car into the row of markers slowly, so that only one marker fell down.  It took one marker to stop a slow car. 

On my data sheet I wrote "slow and "1".  Next I rolled the car at a medium speed, about what I expected to knock down half of the markers.  It took three markers to stop a car from medium speed.  I wrote "medium" and "3". on my data sheet.  I repeated with a fast car.

Next, I hand drew a simple graph representing my data.  I thought that was the end of the lesson.  My intention was to have my kids apply these skills on our final experiment.  I set them free to enjoy knocking down the markers with the car.

A few minutes later my graph had new data.

A few minutes more passed, and I was asked to assist in numbering this master piece.

Real data tables and graphs are done either freehand, or later, on computer.  After seeing my children's enthusiastic response, I am convinced that this is a better way to introduce graphing than through graphing on a pre-done graph.  My final experiment does use a pre-fabricated graph, and my children compliantly followed directions, and where then happy to move on.   

This combination of demonstrating the experiment, with data table and graph, then setting my children free to re-create what I had done worked astonishingly well.  I would love to see how it would work in a standard classroom.  Would you use it as a station activity?  If anyone has the class and the will to try it, please let me know how it goes!

This lesson is part of my new unit Toy Car Physics!  Click here to check out the other activities.

Measuring Length

This week, I have been posting about my new physics unit for kindergarten through second grade.  Before we jumped into the final investigation, we needed to learn a new skill, measuring length!

I prepared a simple presentation that demonstrates how to measure correctly.  You can access it along with the other free materials that support this unit by accessing my Teachers Pay Teacher page.  I kept my explanation to a simple, three-step process.  Line up the zero with one edge of the object, read the number on the other edge of the object, add the appropriate units.  

This is a great time for tactile practice.  My son entertained himself for over twenty minutes measuring objects around the house.  He was still working on nomenclature, so that was the skill we reinforced.  Older students could work on fractions or decimals as they find left over halves or 0.5's.  We made verbal notations of the measurements, but students who are comfortable writing could easily make a list of objects and their lengths.

The opportunity to work with a real tool is the key to student engagement in this lesson.  If I was a working with a classroom, I would keep my eyes peeled at yard sales for interesting measuring implements.  For a faster solution, you might consider some little tape measures like these. 

  As a high school physics teacher, one of my favorite amusements was watching students who had believed themselves to be less intelligent than their peers discover that they were good at one of the most difficult sciences.  This activity is a similar opportunity for younger students who may struggle with paper and pencil style work.  Hopefully, the motivation spills over to other subjects.

Toy Car Story Play

We followed our toy car direction investigation with a simple story telling activity.  Each child got a piece of poster paper and access to markers.  They were instructed to draw a scene that they could use to tell a story with a car.  After the restrictions of the previous activity, they welcomed the creative freedom. Since neither of my children is writing independently yet, they narrated the story while driving the car around their scene, and I wrote it down. 

 The process of them telling, me repeating back, and them telling some more, will hopefully turn into creative writing one of these days.  In the mean time we got some fine motor practice and some speech practice.

My idea was that older students could write down their own stories.  Perhaps small groups could perform their stories in the form of skits.  

Two activities were enough for us to call it a day, but we did pick up with measuring a few days later, and finish with one more major investigation.

Toy Car Direction Investigation

This is the first activity in my unit, Toy Car Physics! Our purpose in this activity was to practice documenting our discoveries, and to cement the relationship between the direction of  force (aka a "push" or "pull") and the resulting movement.  

Before we started, I marked a sheet of poster paper with four directions: back, forward, left, and right.  I showed the paper to my kids and explained that we were going to push and pull a toy car along the paper.

Next, I gave them their data collection sheets, with a matching picture.  Since my kids are both still early readers, I had them circle the word in the picture that matched the word in the sentence.  Then, I prompted them to color in the arrow that they felt represented the direction the car would go when pushed or pulled in that direction.  The example shown is of the expected answer, but I was surprised at how often they chose an unexpected answer.

Finally, I let them try pushing and pulling their cars of choice along the grid on the floor.

They marked their answers on the observation sheet, in exactly the same way they had marked their hypothesis earlier.

Once they had finished their investigation and marked their observations we discussed how their two sheets compared, and what we could conclude from our experiments.

My major surprise with this activity is how challenging they seemed to find it, however they completed it happily.

If you would like a copy of the worksheets pictured above, you can download them for free from my Teachers Pay Teachers Page.   (Click here to go to my Teachers Pay Teachers Page.) We continued this unit with some toy car story play.

If you do try this, please let me know how it goes with your students!