Cars at the Works

The project at The Works this month was cars. The focus was on the engineering process, complete with restrictions on supplies and time. Basically, we were given supplies and had to build a car. Kiddo regularly builds a K'nex car to run on the ramp at The Works, so building a car was nothing new. The materials, however, were entirely new.



The wheels are the bottoms of cups, fastened with tacks to a dowel fed through a drinking straw. Kiddo cut his wheels out by himself, which is only remarkable because he generally doesn't like to cut things like that. He is a perfectionist (like his mom), and his cutting skills rarely live up to his ideals. It is easier for him to deal with the imperfections if they are someone else's. Kiddo needed very little assistance from me. Hammering the tacks into the dowel was the only place I assisted. Kutey had the design of her car (on the left) completely figured out, so I was simply the labor.



Kiddo had to take his car apart and rebuild it when we got to the ramp room--it veered. So we spent most of our time with the cars. Kiddo spent a little time building with K'Nex, Kutey and I programmed the Bee-Bot to go through the maze we created, and we all worked together to make the gears work. We had some success in all of the endeavours, which has not always been the case!

Compasses at the Works

The monthly homeschool day at The Works happened to fall on Kutey's birthday this month. When we discovered that, Kutey was super excited. YAY! No need to plan for the day, someone else did it for me.

This month we covered compasses. First we played with magnets labeled with north and south. Nothing new, we have done this before. This was a little more directed, I guess, but nothing new. There was no explanation of why magnets are magnets, which actually disappointed me a bit. Then we were given a cylinder with iron shavings in it and a magnet that you can put in the middle and take out again. It was cool, but we only got to play with it for a few seconds before they took it away so we could build our own compasses.



This was fun, and again, one of those things where I went "why didn't I think of that!" I was left, however, with the feeling of wanting more. Maybe I was distracted. My friend T was there with her three boys (one of whom is 6 months old--babies are distracting!), so maybe I wasn't paying enough attention, but there seemed to be very little meat to this workshop. I just wanted more. I wanted more explanation of magnets. I wanted more time to play with the cylinder. I understand there is a time limit, maybe I was expecting to much. I don't think the kids felt anything missing, they enjoyed it. I just felt this was more of a play activity with little teaching.

Straw Rockets at the Works

Another homeschool day at The Works! Today we crafted straw rockets, which were a huge hit. The discussion points were air, pressure, and how air movement can move things.



The pieces for this project were so simple. I often think "sheesh, I coulda done that!" after a day at the Works, but the beauty of the Works is, I don't have to. They do it for me; 9 times a year I can take the kids in for a fun experiment.

So what did we use? A Kool-A*d Burst container, two straws of differing diameters, a bit of clay, a bit of paper, a bit of tape. That's it! I wouldn't have had the Burst containers lying around, but the rest of it? Yeah, the rest of it is all in my house, somewhere. You can sort of tell by looking at the pictures how they are constructed. The smaller straw goes in the bottle, held in place and sealed by the clay. The other straw is sealed off with tape.

We spent quite a bit of time launching the straw rockets. At times they had to be tweaked, but over all they work really well!

Other fun we had today at the Works:

Building a maze for the Bee-Bots. These are so much fun. This might be the first time we actually managed to get all of the steps in without issue!


Playing in the "dark room." They have all sorts of color and light things in this space. Kutey loves it, and today Kiddo enjoyed it, too!

We also had fun successfully picking up the blocks in the robot area, too!

The Works Egg Drop Challenge

Today was the final homeschool day of the spring at The Works! The project for today was to build a contraption to prevent an egg from breaking when dropped from a height of 3 stories. We opted to create one for the whole family, working together, rather than trying to get two done. This proved to be an excellent choice, given that we had a tough time even getting one done in time! We were the very last people ones to complete the drop! That is my one complaint about the activity. There was simply not enough time to do the activity. Kiddo could have done a lot more IF we had more time.

Kiddo was full of ideas. We used a paper plate AND a coffee filter as parachutes. Many people used a balloon, but without helium, it really didn't slow things down much. The paper plate and coffee filters caught much more of the air as it came down, which slowed it down significantly. The other thing was to pad the egg effectively. Our last minute choice to blow air into the ziploc baggie that held the egg proved to be wise. It filled much more space in the the box that way, and allowed for more cushioning. We also stuffed our box with foam peanuts and bubble wrap.

In the end, we successfully dropped our egg out of the window, and the egg survived.

Sweet Math at The Works

We have been going to The Works monthly now for a year and a half (minus the summer. They don't do homeschool days in the summer. Too bad.) We enjoy the activities, some more than others. This month was "Sweet Math," an exercise in estimation and budgeting using candy. Yes, candy. And the kids got to eat some. The moms? Not so much. But it really is about the kids, right?



There were 4 stations set up with two jars as you see above. They were for the estimation portion of the activity. The idea was to estimate how many pieces of candy were in the fuller jar, based on the knowledge provided by the other jar. The first jar contained 10 caramels, so from that you were supposed to estimate how many were in the other jar. The Kit K*t jar was the easiest. You could literally count it. The Sk*ttles jar was the hardest. The caramels and St*rburst were in the middle. Kiddo really hasn't done a lot with estimating, so it was fun to see how he worked it through.

The second portion was budgeting. Each participant was given 5 "Works bucks" and a list of candy they could buy, along with prices. This was tricky for kiddo, who has done almost no work with money and math. I had to help him out by breaking things down into terms he could understand. Once he had it all figured out, he got to go order his candy. And then eat it. Well, he got to eat a couple of pieces. He got to buy 5--too many to eat in one sitting! Kutey participated too, she picked out the candy she wanted from the choices I gave her. Then placed her order. And ate the candy. She really had no idea how it all added up, but was happy to play a little store.

Our Classroom Today--December 29

We missed the homeschool day at the Works this month. The weather was a little iffy and the roads weren't great. Kiddo also had art class that afternoon, so it just made more sense to get to the closer event and skip the other one.

But my Tuesday group decided to go to the Works for one of our Tuesdays! It was a general public day, so it was very different than the homeschool days. It always amazes me what the kids will do here. Kiddo hit the block room and helped build a huge fort out of the foam blocks. You can see from the picture that is was as high as the door. It is so much fun to watch the kids working together to build something. I missed how this started, but by the end, they were using all of the blocks and all of the kids were working together. Love it!

Kutey loves to play in the dark room. She loves to mix colors, and especially dance in the split light. They have three lights on the ceiling, which results in the fun multi-colored shadows you see above. Kutey and I spent quite a lot of time in there playing. She didn't get into the foam block building, but did build a nice tall tower out of the small wooden blocks.


The activity was disk drive dissection. I was a little disappointed they didn't tell us more about the drives. We took the whole thing apart, and then, fortunately, could take it home with us. The trickiest part was getting it back into a state that could be taken home again! I wanted a few screws in place so it wouldn't fall apart in my bag. The drives also have super powerful magnets inside them. If they are put back together, that magnet has a much smaller chance of coming into contact with things it shouldn't.

Kiddo is lucky. Daddy works in computers, so they took the whole drive apart again and Daddy explained how it all works. I felt bad for the kids who couldn't go home and have it all explained. Mostly, it seemed, Kiddo liked the noise his made when he turned the platters. I am not sure he had any real idea of what the drive even was, just that he got to take a whole lot of screws out of it.

Slow school week

It has been a slow school week around here. I have been super busy with a fundraising event, so I haven't had much time to pull things together. We did attend The Works homeschool day on Wednesday. It was about earthquakes. While their programs are always good, this one was my least favorite so far. They had an "earthquake" machine to simulate an earthquake. The kids built towers out of K'Nex, then put them on the machine to see how their building stood up to the earthquake. But they all stood up to the earthquake. So there was very little interesting to see. Few of them even moved, other than sliding back and forth on the machine. I have never been in an earthquake, thank goodness, but it just didn't seem like a very good representation to me. And they talked very little about earthquakes before they got the kids started, partly because building the towers takes a lot of time.

I have several things in the works to post, including our eggsperiment, a review of SpellQuizzer software, and a few other tidbits here and there. Hopefully things have calmed down for the time being...

The Works does it again!

Today's homeschool day at The Works involved creating a hovercraft out of a cd (a brand new one. Do they not know how many old ones are out there?), a film canister and a balloon. Intrigued? It looks something like this, only ours used a film canister in place of the bottle top. It was very cool. Kiddo and Kutey thought it was fun. Kiddo and I then had to go out and find some videos about hovercraft. This one is fun, and this one shows you how it works.

We also had a blast making K'Nex cars and racing them down the track they have there. Kutey had never really gotten into it before, so today I built her a car that actually went all the way down the track on most trials! That was an accomplishment for me, too. She loved racing it down, cheering, and taking it back to the top. She didn't understand that her car sometimes came in after the other car. She was just thrilled to have finished. Gotta like that kind of enthusiasm!