Today we did a science experiment on sound. OK I need to be honest and tell you all this was not a "lesson" or something "planned". I am NOT a planner! I don't like to admit this but I don't plan out many of our school activities. I have heard so many people say about how they are working on making plans for the summer, next school year, sports seasons, and organize get togethers with other moms. I don't get this. I am more a make it up as I go type of person. (Now everyone who knows me in real life understands the blank confused look on my face when they talk about planning things) I will confess I make plans on the fly at home. I have found that if I have enough supplies on hand we can create all the time with no need to plan. I improvise a lot. I do make plans to leave the house but that is only because I need to pack diapers, coats, bikes, and snacks to keep the children happy when we go out. At home most of our fun learning happens naturally. Today we had a long water pipe on our porch. I dug it out of the garage yesterday so Travis could cut and build with it. We left it laying on the porch so he could do more things with it (because I was to lazy to pick it up yesterday). This morning I went into the house to get some pretzels for the children's snack time. When I came back out Travis was talking into one end of the tube and Demi was laughing with the other end at her ear. I watched them play with this long length of water pipe for a long time. I asked Travis if he would like to add ends to the pipe to make it a bit easier to talk into. He wasn't sure but decided to give it a try. We looked around in our sand/water toys and found a store bought funnel and a homemade funnel (cut soda bottle). We got out some masking tape and taped the funnels on.
Here is a picture of Travis talking into his end.
And one of him listening. His end had the small funnel stuck inside it.
Here is Demi talking to him on the other end.
And a picture of her listening.
We had hours of fun with this. We noticed you could clearly hear what the other person was saying even when we whispered very quietly. This worked much better than the can and string phones we tried a few years ago. We have a decorative dinner bell on our porch that Travis rings it when he someone to answer the phone. We have another very long piece of water tubing left that Travis wants to use to make a phone for him and a friend to play with next week in our yard. He wants to build forts and make a long phone to run from one fort to the other. He has plans to call each other trying to get them to surrender camps (forts) or come out to fight. He wants to fight by bombing each other with water balloons. LOL! I am sure if his friend doesn't like this idea Daddy will have lots of fun doing this with Travis.
I wanted to make this phone project earlier in the school year but I was going to use a garden hose. At the time Travis and Demi had no interest in making it. Travis said he already knew how it worked and wanted to skip it and make some other science project. I now think it is funny how something he didn't want to do in the past is something so exciting and fun now. This fits into what we learned about this school year so we have lots of books we can dig out and read again.
Notes on our project.
We found our phone conversations worked better if we said "over" every time we finished what we said. My children did a lot of talking over each other until we started that. We used plastic tubing because it was something we had. If you wanted to do this but don't have a bunch of plastic water tubing in your garage one of our books says to do this with a regular garden hose. This was a VERY easy project. My 2 year old can stick the funnel in the tube and 8 month old laughs when she hears a familiar voice coming out of the dark tube. I love projects that children from baby-adult can all do together. I think we will read over our chapters on sound in our science books over the weekend. We will get out our history books and do more reading about Alexander Graham Bell. When the children loose interest I will let it go.
My children are good at making it look like I plan things. LOL!
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