Science Camp 2011, Part I (of III)

My good friend Sabra (Sew a Straight Line) brought up the idea of a Science Camp a few months before summer.  We got really excited talking about it!  Our kids are great friends and we knew it would work out good.  Especially since her sister was interested in coming as well, and she’s an Elementary School teacher.

We had a planning meeting beforehand, and determined what subjects we wanted to cover, who would teach what, and planned meals.  Here is the schedule we decided on and Sabra typed up for us:

You can see that we were sure to schedule in plenty of free time for the kids to play. And really, most of the camp was just structured play!

We also each made our own kids’ messenger bags (posted yesterday) all very similar with the same things inside so that they would be pretty equal and no problems would occur over that ;).

*I’ve borrowed some pictures from Sabra.*

We left Monday…

and drove down to Pinto, Utah, which is close to Cedar City.  Sabra’s family owns some property there and a building that had flushing toilets and showers and a kitchen, which was great!

After roasting hot dogs and marshmallows for dinner,

we quickly got ready for bed since it was late (long story short:  Susie got a flat tire and was stranded for a while before getting there) and moved on to our first science activity. Sabra was awesome and made a design for our t-shirts and talked about the chemical reaction from the bleach and the fabric.  We used a stencil she made (you can see how she did it on her blog HERE).  

The second day we started with the area overview.  I couldn’t find out much about the area that would last even close to an hour, so we talked about the different types of rocks.  I made a poster discussing metamorphic, igneous, and sedimentary rocks.  I had checked out a lot of books from the library for pictures to show and also gathered some different types of rocks they could handle.  One great source I found on the rock cycle can be found here.

We also worked on flora and fauna books (plants and animals).  I should have had the kids go outside to look at their surroundings, but I just had them base it on what they had already observed.  I had also printed off thumbnails of many animals and plants listed as being in the area for them to look at.

C was pretty sure every bird he saw was a bald eagle.

And D was scared he’d find a rattlesnake since those staying in the area had killed two recently.

And B drew vicious monsters ;). 

Next Suzi talked about weather.  And she is definitely a teacher. She did a wonderful job and my lessons paled drastically in comparison!  Check out the many experiments she had for the kids to try!

She had them all make their own “weather in a bag” so they could see some of the process.

Outside talking about clouds.

Making their own thermometer.

Observing condensation.

B meticulously taking notes.

Talking about air changes and temperature.

And finally, for the last weather experiment, making our own storm.  I’m sure you could Google all of these experiments.  The kids loved them!

It was a little hard having B there—she had a blast but also was needy.  She turns three in September, but I think four and up would be ideal.  I was glad she was there just so I wouldn’t have to miss her all week, though.  (she’s listening to music)

After lunch, I was up again talking about the sun.  I learned SO many fun and interesting facts about the sun, and I had the kids do a fill in the blank poster full of fun facts to quiz them on their knowledge.  I again used books from the library for my main sources, though of course the internet would have everything you ever wanted to know online.

After we learned more about the sun, we went outside to use our magnifying glass to burn paper and explained why this works.  We didn’t have a lot of success with the paper even though I did at home with the same paper, but it worked fabulously with the dried leaves/weeds or wood we tried.

Next the kids gathered objects to use sun sensitive photo paper and create their own sun photography.

I love how they turned out!  The stencils were really neat.

But I preferred the ones where the kids found their own items. 

We skipped the space hour since we had gotten more and more behind and the kids needed a break.

Stay tuned for Part II tomorrow!  Thanks for reading!