FUN WITH FRICTION
Welcome to our “Physics, Forces, Far too Much Fun! – DIY At Home Science Camp” series. For this camp day, we focused on an exploration of friction! Read through for ideas books, writing prompts, experiments, and more!
A TYPICAL DAY
All kids are different and you can definitely vary your day with whatever works for you 🙂 But the gist of our day having our kiddos focus on some work books or online learning tools in the early morning, an intro to the day’s theme after they were done, some videos around lunch time, and themed activities (reading time, writing time, crafts, food crafts/snacks, and games or experiments) in the afternoon. Feel free to pick and choose whatever works for you 🙂
INTRO
If you have elementary-age kids, they may already be familiar with the concept of friction – or at least that their toy cars can’t go forever when they push them :). If not, pbslearning has a few interactive sites that help kids learn about the concepts:
- Friction Circus – An interesting way to teach friction with dogs as the star of the show 🙂
- Pulling for the Plushie – Also an interesting way to teach how surfaces affect how something is pulled.
WHAT TO WATCH
Here are a few storytimes / videos related to our camp
- Magic School Bus: S1E10 Forces.
- The Cat in The Hat Knows a lot about That: S3E3: 3. Fact & Friction / Pulling Together
FOOD CRAFTS / SNACKS
For our food craft of the day, we “created cars” out of circle and rectangular crackers – nothing too fancy but we imagined them over different surfaces.
READING
It’s no secret that reading helps prevent that summer slide. Some even say this is the most important. For a day with forces, we picked Forces Make Things Move by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley.
WRITING & WRITING PROMPTS
Just like reading, writing helps prevent that summer slide by both encouraging their creativity but also their motor skills and penmanship.
If you’ve got a little one, have them trace words related to the theme:FORCES, FRICTION, SURFACE, etc..
If you’ve got older children, have them write a sentence or two up to a page or two (depending on their age). Encourage them to be creative AND give reasons for why they made certain choices.
- Which sport would be the most fun to play in a frictionless environment. Why?
EXPERIMENTS
We tried to keep our experiments relatively simple with tasks that could be completed within a few minutes and definitely less than an hour.
For our experiment on friction, we created some ramps out of some package boxes. We varied the surfaces by taping/gluing fabric, foil, and some paper. We hypothesized which ramp would slow down our toy cars the most and then tested our theories 🙂
THANK YOU!!!
Thank you for checking out our at home play / summer camp guide! Hopefully this has helped grow the JOY in learning in your home and/or even inspired more ideas!
Also, if you haven’t already, check out some of our other at home play / summer guides: DIY Camps.
If you enjoyed this article, please let us know what you think in the comments below and/or follow us on Pinterest
Happy Reading!
