Newsletter: April 19, 2017

Welcome back, everyone. I hope you all had a wonderful break. While my family stayed relatively close to home, a number of kids came back with stories about some pretty exciting trips around the city, state, and beyond. Thanks to all the kids who sent me photos of their adventures so I could know what they were up to. Here are a few of the kids' adventures...

When we returned to our classroom this week we were welcomed by some pretty cool critters revealing themselves to us at the pond outside our window. There was a HUGE frog, a 3-foot long black rat snake, and a tiny mouse. As you can imagine, we lost focus on our work for at least a few minutes.

We now have just six-and-a-half weeks remaining in the school year. In that time we'll be saying goodbye to Ms. Wilson (this week, in fact), exploring the Civil War, reviewing all the concepts we've studied in math this year, creating  persuasive book trailers (commercials) to promote some of our favorite books, and preparing for the standardized tests the kids have to take in early May.  This week we are finishing up our persuasive essays on a favorite book (to become the script for our commercials), exploring award-winning books in preparation for some work we'll soon be doing to help select award winners for next year, wrapping up our study of geometry, and learning about electromagnets.

Speaking of electromagnets, since we've been learning about electricity and magnets I brought in a project I've been working on at home that involves both electricity and magnetism. I've been trying to create a stir plate out of a project box, small computer fan, rare earth magnets (not as special as they sound), and a DC plug left over from some electronic device we don't even own any longer. The kids were very excited to see how this works. We had a lot of fun "playing" with it at Explorations as well as learning what happens when you swim into a whirlpool.

The box has a fan inside with the lid of a metal can glued to the top. When wired to the
DC plug the fan starts to spin and so does the lid. On top of the lid are two magnets that
spin as well.

We also had small pill-shaped magnets of various sizes that will stick on top of the
two spinning magnets. When the lid of the fan is closed the pill-shaped magnet
sticks on top of the box and spins in concert with the two round magnets below.

We controlled the rate of the spinning using this DC plug. It has a slider
that allows us to change the voltage going to the fan. This makes it
spin faster and slower. 

Finally, we placed a flask of water on top and filled it to the 1000 ml mark. We
then dropped in the pill-shaped magnet, moved it around until it set itself in place above
the two magnets on the fan below, and plugged it in. As we increased the voltage the fan
began to spin faster and eventually created a vortex. We experimented using different sized
pill-shaped magnets to see how it affected the vortex. We also dropped bits of paper in, pretending
they were swimmers, to see what happens when you get too close to a whirlpool. As you
might imagine, we learned to STAY AWAY FROM WHIRLPOOLS. It twas a lot of fun!