A DAY WITH GRAVITY
Welcome to our
Welcome to our “For the Love of Science – A Fun-Filled DIY Forces Camp” series. For this camp day, we focused on the force of gravity! Read through for ideas books, writing prompts, experiments, crafts, 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 gravity. If not, pbslearning has an interactive site on gravity and some related terms: Falling for Gravity.
WHAT TO WATCH
For our video of the camp day, we actually picked a few space-themed books read on https://storytimefromspace.com/. While some of the books aren’t fully focused on gravity, it was exciting for the kids to see some astronauts (some even from space) reading some of their favorite space-themed books!
FOOD CRAFTS / SNACKS
For our food craft of the day, we challenged our kids to make a ‘gravity defying’ snack 🙂 We ended up with a “super tall” veggie and fruit tower and a “hovering” graham cracker. Though they weren’t exactly gravity defying, it was a fun way to engage them with the concept.
READING
It’s no secret that reading helps prevent that summer slide. Some even say this is the most important. For our gravity camp day, we picked Moon’s First Friends by Leonard Hill. It’s a sweet little picture book from the moon’s perspective AND includes pages about the actual astronauts who landed on the moon.
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, GRAVITY, FALL, 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.
- If you were on the moon (with less gravity than Earth), do you think it would be fun to jump on a trampoline? What about having a race?
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 gravity, we observed a spinning pendulum:. There is a short (less than 6 min) video on pendulums on pbslearning: Thank Goodness for Gravity. Once we watched that, we tried to make our own pendulum, made hypotheses on when they would stop, and observed how they moved..
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.
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Happy Reading!
