Recently we attended our local festival in Joondalup. It's all free and we got to play lots of old fashioned fairground games, meet performers and enjoy music and circus shows.
Splat the joey
Limbo
In the evening we joined some of our new friends from Homeschool WA as we paraded our creations in the lantern festival.
The children have been working with Dad to make some automata toys. To get an idea of the amazing things that can be made, watch this video from Cabaret Mechanical:
In the last few days the children have been experimenting with different toys and the forces that act upon them to make them move. We found out that many toys we own operate by stretching or squashing springs.
We made an elastic band powered boat.
We compared springs to elastic bands and made a car catapult.
We also tried letting cars roll down a slope to see how far they went. We changed the type of car first whilst keeping everything else the same.
Next we kept the slope and car the same and added weights to the car to see what effect this had.
Lastly we used the same car and changed the angle of the slope. The children recorded and graphed their results.
R worked on a course from FutureLearn: Begin Robotics whilst L used her craft skills to make a peg doll and a thaumatrope. R has also been attending Lego robotics workshops.
Lego Robotics
The children made a timeline of toys from the past. Find the resource (and others) here.
They tied out this Bayko building set toy from the 1960s. it's not as easy to construct the models as it is with Lego! We also had a game of marbles.
We are just starting a cross-curricular unit on toys. We'll cover history, science and technology. We are using several schemes of work from the old UK National Curriculum website.
We'll also be making some moving toys inspired by the Tinkering Studio.
To get us started today we went to the Museum of Sydney for the Toys Through Time exhibition. Here we investigated toys from the past and how they compare to modern toys today. The children picked up the free activity trail in the gallery. It was hard to get photos with the low lighting and reflections.
We also took the trail around the permanent galleries.
Over the next few weeks we'll be making our own toys and conducting lots of experiments to see how toys work. Pop back soon.
