Catapults, marshmallows and acorns

We had an awesome day today!!

We continued with our science unit in the morning - solids and liquids - by watching ice cubes melt. :) I froze them in muffin cups with "surprises" in them so the solids were avidly watched for 2 hours and 15 minutes until they released their prizes. We checked and documented every 30 minutes in between discussions and exploring a fun Bitesize science interactive demo on the smartboard. I had a surprise walk-in observation but since the kiddies were thoroughly enjoying themselves AND were super engaged in the lesson I didn't mind at all! Always a good thing when that happens!!

Here are our ice cubes melting - with lots of eager little hands crowded around. :)

After recess we moved on to Math and had a team game to practice rounding to the nearest ten - Acorn Round Up!!

It was unbelievably noisy but the girls LOVED it and actually asked to play it again tomorrow!!

Each team got several squirrels with numbers under them - 2-digit, 3-digit and 4-digit numbers. The acorns had rounded numbers that matched the squirrels' numbers and I stuck these onto two large trees that I drew on the white board.
The kids had to take turns to round a squirrel number, race to harvest the acorn, return the acorn to their team table and pass the squirrel to the next team player to round her number. They recorded their results on sheets so that I could check them at the end.

It was GREAT!! The shrieking had to be heard to be believed but the rounding was pretty good!! Only one team member could move at a time and they could only help each other by providing the strategies - no doing the work FOR each other!

Watching some of the smaller people jump up and down trying to reach an acorn (before thinking of getting a chair to help them) was hysterical. :)

Trees waiting to be harvested

Helping the squirrel find an acorn

Racing to round!

This child was jumping to get an acorn!

And we ended our day by making catapults! Yep - this was our writing activity this week: practicing writing up an experiment. :)

And it doubled as a topic activity since the ancient Romans used catapults so we were investigating this aspect of Roman warfare a little early. Mind you, the Romans didn't get to use mini-marshmallows as their ammunition! :)

Construction begins

Adding the vertical supports

This pair used a LOT of tape to secure
their catapult

Almost ready to fire!!

One lethal marshmallow ready to launch!

 

It's too bad you can't see their faces because they
were LOVING this!! On the other side of the room are
all the people under "attack" with their mouths
wide open to catch the falling "rocks".

And in between all this excitement we had our photos taken for the year book. When it was all over one of my kiddies kindly told me that I really should have brushed my hair before my photo!! Oh well... I'll just make sure to put catapult pictures in the year book so everyone can see the reason I look a mess! :)