Thursday, October 4, 2012

Friction, Friction, What is Friction?

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I have decided we need to make a question box. In one day alone I can try to field way too many questions from Selena to give each one the attention it really needs for understanding. We’ve taken it rather slow making the transition from “I am going to school” to “I am homeschooled” and I see where using this time has really been helpful for Selena. She has really bounced back to the Selena we had before public school was even a thought in our minds.

Yesterday, Selena suddenly asked me, “What is friction?” This came after she got a small rug burn. I guess you know we pulled out as many things as we could think of to try to answer this question. In the picture above Selena is investigating two different types of rubber, the rubber soles on her shoes and the smooth rubber bands used on the wheels of her little train engine.

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I then asked her to feel the differences in the carpet and the floor. I love how she had her own idea of how this could be done. She related these two surfaces to the bottom of the shoes and train. The carpet was more like her shoes, while the floor was more like the wheels on the train.

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She then was asked to push the train across the carpet and we marked how far it went. Yes, that is a baby book she is using for a marker, she found it and realized we forgot to send it to her brother…oops.

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Of course you know we had to push the train across the floor to see how much further it would go. Yes, Selena had already predicted the train would go further across the floor then on the carpet.

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The one that surprised her the most was how much easier it was to push her shoe on the carpet then it was on the floor. Right after I put the camera away she of course grabbed her rubber boot from last year and was totally surprised as to how it gripped even harder to the floor then the shoe. We compared the soles of both and she determined the more ridges and the fact they are closer together would probably be better to help her from falling on the ice this winter.

Wait Winter?? She is now all about winter since we woke to our first heavy frost this morning. She just knew it had snowed over night.

Science Sunday
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3 comments:

  1. You have had frost already? Sounds like you have a curriculum just with answering her questions!

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  2. Wow - frost already? We had 100 degrees earlier this week, but it's cooling down now here as well. I love how this lesson went - following the questions and interests is the best way to learn.

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  3. Frost? I"m in as much shock as everyone else. We're still pretty warm right now.

    I LOVE the idea of a question box, that'd be so much fun!

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