The Daily Life Of An Animal Lover

                                                                         

 I made a new blog where I will post daily. I will be writing about animal facts, my pets, and more animal related things. I would love it if  you checked it out and feel free to ask questions. Please follow,  here's a link to it iwuvanimals.blogspot.com. 

                                                   

A Rube Goldberg Challenge ~ Turn the Light Off

Looks like we were timely to explore Rube Goldberg as our Thinker of the Month.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Our time spent during "school" has mostly been spent outside of home, so we haven't really scratched the surface of exploring our Thinker yet. Our trip to the library confirmed that yes, Rube Goldberg was someone who is deifintely worth learning more about.

                                                                                   

When I saw this activity set up I was so thankful. This was the most perfect way to get the kids charged up about Rube again, it was so well organized too. I got a lot of ideas of how to pull this type of thing off at home.

                                                                                     

The Rube Goldberg challenge was to turn the light off. The clip is very short, but you can still see that this activity had DJ thinking. DJ and Ken both were successful at accomplishing this challenge, and of course the camera never works when your ready to record that great moment :)

Thinker of the Month

This month we are starting a Thinker of the Month. Well, I will try to introduce a new Thinker each month, but if the kids are highly interested in our current Thinker past the month we will continue until more inspiration is needed.

                                                                             

Since we will be also learning about simple Physics/Electronics using Basic Foundations of Scientific Understanding, I thought Rube Goldberg would be the perfect Thinker to explore.

I got a lot of  recycled materials handy and a surprise kick off project in a bag. We have a lot of busyness going on this week so I most likely will pass off their bag of inspiration over to them this Sunday.

                                                                      

                                                                               

3D Printing Machine

This week is Lansing Maker Week. Today we visited the East Lansing Public Library's Pop up Makerspace.

                                                                             

                                                                               

They were so excited to learn about and make things with the 3D printer and so was I. This Makerspace is available three days a week and on Saturdays for FREE for the next six months. I think this  place is going to be a valuable resource to us. 

Do you have a Makerspace in your area?

Making it Your Own

The best things in life are unexpected - because there were no expectations - Eli Khamarov

 We help operate a non profit that is operated out of our house, it sounds crazy doesn't it?  The kids help me out a lot, especially when I want to test out an activity that I will be doing. The Marshmallow Catapult will be an activity done in one of our weekly events "Get Unplugged!" it is for ages 6-9 years old.  DJ saw the materials and volunteered for this one. I showed him the pictures from this tutorial, so he could have an idea of how to get it started.                                                             

Now I know you may have seen a Marshmallow Catapult before or heard about it. I just wanted to share our Marshmallow Catapult engineering experience. DJ's catapult kept falling apart and finally he asked can I do this another way. He went and got some tape and the catapult was working to his liking. We have concluded that no two catapults will be just alike! I think our friends who attend  "Get Unplugged!" will totally agree with us. 

We are going to make some targets too, hopefully this will decrease the amount of marshmallow eating :)