Here in our homeschool, we believe in making the most of our time, killing more than one bird with one stone, covering our bases. And so, when it came to a science experiment recently, we not only covered science, we covered music and art and weather as well. If you give me a minute, I could probably come up with another couple of subject areas. Oh, yes, public speaking. Just take a look:
These 8 bottles, all lined up, are not the juice I served this morning at breakfast. Nope, they are a demonstration of how varying the amount of liquid in a bottle will change the sound made when you blow over the opening. The more liquid you add, the deeper the tone. Setting up 8 bottles allowed the kids to create a full octave, thus a musical scale. Do, Re, Mi, Fa . . . well, you get the picture. I had visions of Von Trapp Family Singers going through my head. After adjusting the water levels, they proceeded to play little ditties such as "Twinkle Twinkle" and "Jingle Bells".
Now, plain ol' see-through water is just plain ol' boring. So, I gave them food coloring - red, yellow, blue - and let them experiment with mixing primary colors, creating all the colors of the rainbow. ROY.G.BIV - Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. They had to come up with an 8th color, so they picked 'light' red (hoping for pink).
On their own, while adding the coloring, they discovered they could create a tornado in a bootle. Cool!!!!
And finally, Gabe presented the rainbow colored bottles/musical scales at our homeschool Presentation Day. He explained how they adjusted water levels, how they mixed colors, and then tapped out the Alphabet Song with a spoon.
Discovery Learning at its finest!
Yay! I remember doing this :-) I look forward to doing it with my kids someday. Go, Gabe! That seems right down his alley.
ReplyDeleteIt's fun revisiting activities we did long ago. And, yes, science is just his thing.
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