Science Fair

School has been out for awhile now, but I thought I would go back and recap a few of the highlights of the end of school flurry of activities.

Science Fair:

Each year it's a balance between their ideas and my time, energy, and mess tolerance.  This year was a good year for both.  Science fair in Kindergarten can be a challenge.  It should be their idea, but they don't know that much.  It is easy to recreate something from a book or a website.  Just Google science fair and there are endless projects out there.  That isn't the point.

My Girl wanted to study earthquakes.  After discussing several ideas we decided to look at how well different types of buildings would survive a good shaking, so we built two buildings on a cookie sheet and then shook it gently then harder to see which one fell down first.  We did tall vs. short and hollow vs. solid.  Short and solid win!  The thing that I like best about this is that it was her question and her idea.  I helped out, but it was she was in charge and she loved it.

 



 

Buddy Boy wanted to study the fletching on arrows.  He had read about duct tape fletching in Backwoodsman magazine and different styles of fletching in his weapons book.  Based on our limited archery and fletching skill we narrowed it down to just two styles of arrows, fletched and unfletched, and enlisted the help of a teenager from church who is a pretty good archer.  We then compared the accuracy and the precision of the arrows.  We had three of each type of arrow.  We measured accuracy using the average distance from the center of the target and precision using the perimeter of the triangle made by the three arrow holes.  There was little difference in the accuracy of the arrows, but the fletching did seem to help with the precision.

 

 

 

Unfortunately, Buddy Boy was sick on the day of the science fair and didn't get to present his project to the class.  He did have a good time working on it.

When I was describing our "Fletching Olympics" to Grandma L. she told me about how she used to help her brothers fletch their arrows with chicken feathers.  They had a little jig to get the spacing right and used a wire from the heating element of an old toaster to burn the edges of feathers to get them all the same shape.  I bet that was smelly! We won't be doing that any time soon.