Rosie Revere, Engineer

My new favorite children's book is Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty. It's all about tinkering and making things.

Rosie Revere is a second grader who dreamed of becoming a great engineer, who "made fine inventions for her uncles and aunts; a hot dog dispenser and helium pants." But after some failures she decides she will never be a great engineer. When her cheese-copter crashes, her great great aunt (who happens to be Rosie the Riveter) tells her, "You did it Hooray! It's the perfect first try! This great flop is over. It's time for the next!... It crashed that is true. But first it did just what it needed to do. Before it crashed, Rosie... before that ... it flew!"

The last page - "Your brilliant first flop was a raging success! Come on, let's get busy and on to the next!" She [aunt Rose] handed a notebook to Rosie Revere, who smiled at her aunt as it all because clear. Life might have its failures, but this was not it. The only true failure can come if you quit."

Rosie Revere is funny and teaches a great lesson and the artwork (by David Roberts) is wonderful. And on top of all that, there is a smart girl as the main character who my little engineer has declared looks just like her.

The same author wrote Iggy Peck, Architect, which is also wonderful, but my favorite is by far Rosie Revere.

Building materials are everywhere

Some spontaneous building at the office supply store... 

Oil and Ice

We experimented with density of liquids today. First we colored some ice and got some cooking oil.

Then we put the ice in the oil. As the ice melts, the water droplets sink to the bottom of the oil - a bit like a lava lamp.

The idea was that the ice would float on the oil (because it is less dense than the oil) but the water would sink (because it is more dense than oil). The density of canola oil which is what we had around our house is 0.915 g/cc and the density of ice is 0.916 g/cc so our oil wasn't quite dense enough for the ice to float, so we ended up putting the ice above the cup of oil and letting the water drip into the oil from above. Apparently castor oil has a density of 0.96 so that should work better. Liquid water has a density of 1.00 g/cc

Solar paper and loose parts

I had some very old solar paper laying around. It says to use within six months, but we thought it still might be good after six years of sitting on a shelf. Solar paper allows you to record images of shadows. We did this early in the morning in January - the sun was very low in the sky so we got very long shadows. This meant when we first tried to make sunprints of blocks, the shadows were so big that they covered the whole paper. So, we went looking for some flatter objects.

We tried lots of different materials for making sunprints. The box of fasteners was by far the most interesting

Laying everything out and looking at the shadows.

When the blue paper turned white, it was time to bring it inside and put it in water.

Finished sunprint after developing in water -- notice how the shadows look 3-D - white areas were where no sun hit and the lighter areas are where the shadows were (but some indirect sunlight hit the paper)

Then she just played with the pieces.

This reminded me of the "Theory of loose parts" - an idea developed by an architect in the 1970's. He said, "In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it." ~ Simon Nicholson, Architect

Loose parts are things that children can manipulate and use in different ways. In the current literature on pre-school education, as far as I understand, it has come to mean small objects that can be moved around from place to place and used in different ways -- much like the screws and washers in the fasteners box. But the original intention of loose parts seems to be something larger -- a principle of interaction. In his essay (can be read here), Nicholson advocated interacting, experimenting, building, inquiring and manipulating variables. The actual materials seemed to be less important.

Solar paper can also be used to investigate how well sunscreen blocks sunlight. To do this, place a piece of glass or plexiglass (e.g., flat glass baking dish) on the solar paper and smear the glass with varying types of sunscreen. The image created on the solar paper will show how well the sunscreen blocked the light.

Painting a Rainbow: Making inspired by a book.

A few weeks ago, when reading the book "Planting a Rainbow" by Lois Ehlert, IttyBitty decided to plant her own rainbow. I drew out some pots and she colored them in the colors of the rainbow -- we had our plan.

The next weekend we bought some little pots -- one for each color of the rainbow -- and painted them as colorfully as possible.We just poured paint on the pots and let it drip down the sides. We were inspired by this post (http://www.dillydaliart.com/2012/04/rainbow-pour-painting-on-terra-cotta.html)

After two full days of drying, they were ready to plant. We went to the garden store and bought some flowers and seeds.

A rainbow of flowers - red, orange, yellow, (green leaves) and blue-purple.