Islands of Trash

This is pretty gross and disturbing. Can you imagine that we are willingly putting trash in our oceans?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/10patch.html?_r=1&hp

Super Structures

The Egg Drop

It survived!

Archaeology in Action

Modeling an archaeological dig....

Building Bridges

This is an activity we did to build cooperative skills. The kids had some newspaper and masking tape and had to work together to build a bridge that would hold a bag full of my materials.

Motivate...

These are the motivation posters we made in class the first week of school. Pretty great.

Oldies but Goodies

I found some old photos in my hard drive from my first year at CHIME. This was the 2005-2006 school year....and these particular photos were from a science experiment gone wrong. Lesson learned--always, and I mean ALWAYS try these things in advance before trying them in the classroom--even though I had seen this done, I had never tried it myself. Once it worked though, it was indeed an "oooo ahhhh" experiment.

This is called the great cornstarch explosion. Cornstarch, by nature, will not ignite (when it is laying in a big pile). But, when you disperse it into the air (like, say, through a big tube) while holding a propane torch, it makes a big fireball. This time around, however, I didn't realize just HOW hard it was to blow the cornstarch out of the tube. Instead, I sucked it IN (hence all the white mess everywhere). Well, I choked, and I don't mean a little bit. I mean a lot! And while the kids all thought it was pretty funny, my eyes were watering, and I sputtered for a few minutes while trying to catch my breath.

Perhaps my favorite part was watching Sam (my helper in the pics). Look at his little face. :)