Science Fridays

I felt like I was cramming too much learning into each day. I wanted to take time to explore some topics in-depth.

The idea came to me in three parts.

It dawned on me that at a university most classes don't meet five days a week. Some meet three, others two and most labs meet only one day each week.

Couple that with reading Harry Potter. If you pay close attention to the schedule you'll notice that students have lessons on a particular day of the week for each subject.

Then I thought of the NPR show Science Friday, and voila, our own Science Fridays were born.

It's not something we do every Friday. I tested it out in June before we took a summer break. We just so happened to be reading about cephalopods and there were awesome videos of cephalopods for that week's Science Friday on NPR. I took it as a sign of fate.

We spent the morning watching videos on octopus and one interesting specifies known as the vampire squid - though it's not actually a squid - and then we pulled out the "Planet Earth" dvds and made some of our own creatures out of Play-Doh.

 We've done a few more sessions since, and it's turned out to be a whole lot of fun.

 

Our quest to find ducks a few weeks back coincided with our Friday theme.

We also uncovered a black-noir video about tar, and ice-age animals that feel prey to it. Again, courtesy of the "real" Science Friday.

One of my favorites so far was what we did this past week. I actually did some advance planning for this one. We read about jellyfish and then watched NPR archived Science Friday videos. Did you know there's a fried egg jellyfish? Well, there is, and its story and life cycle are quite interesting.

One video we came across was about a remote control jellyfish. To be honest, it's one of the most pointless inventions I've ever seen, but the kids loved the video!!

We ended up attaching strips of paper to balloons to make our own version.