Bricks, Blood, Bulbs

 The Question Box contained a whole heap of Question Cards, all in the same handwriting, all beginning with
                How do you make
Clearly somebody was on a roll with these. I chose to share
                How do you make brick  
because of the  convenient tie-in with art class (where they were talking about clay and kilns just last week). This could have been a really short Q&A ("How do you make brick? You take clay. You bake it."), but trust our kids to find the leaks in any presentation. Hold on a second: I saw clay in art class. It was gray, not red! From here: yellow clay, red clay, iron oxide, Mars, . . .

Also in the question box was the scientific and poetic query
                Does your heart still beat when you don't feel it
which the class enthusiastically answered without my help ("if it didn't, you would be dead!"), and which led to a vociferous debate on the velocity of blood, and a wide-open opportunity to talk about the circulatory system. So, it's clear what I need to drag in from the library this week.

The demo/presentation for the week consisted of a genuine working electric circuit (battery plus lightbulb. As it turns out, I DID have a good reason to save all those old auto taillights in the box in the corner of the garage; I just didn't know it at the time). In a burst of either creativity or outright silliness, I asked the children to take part in a live action simulation drama in which they, as actors, played the part of copper atoms and had to pass a bunch of electrons (styrofoam balls) around the circle. Perhaps you parents can act the part of my Cognition Spies. By gentle and subtle interrogation, you try to find out whether that little masquerade had any impact. The child's state of mind could be something like
- yeah. I totally got the idea because it was so vivid this way
- he explained about a circuit, but trying to BE a circuit was a little overdone
- we played a game with styrofoam balls. I wonder why.
- science class? was there science class last week?