Measurements

I was tasked by the 5-in-a-Row supplement to teach W the following: there exist 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and 5280 feet in a mile (I Googled just now to double-check this last one).  In addition, we were tasked with measuring W's height and finding the height of La Girafe.


I decided that the conversion numbers are the least important aspect of this lesson. Foremost is to show that measurements are useful.  I asked W how we might build a lid for our stove, and we worked through using the measuring tape to decide where to make cuts in our imaginary lumber (our pretend buzz cutting being the highlight of the lesson).


Next, we thought about other things we might measure or different ways to measure things.  I told W about how there are devices that measure distance by how long it takes light to bounce back and forth.  We put the same principle into practice by counting how long it took for W to run back and forth.  W knew that the longer it took for him to bounce back and forth, the greater the distance.


I also wanted to emphasize that measuring units are fairly arbitrary, so we remembered a past lesson in measuring the house in lengths of W.  We created "the crayon" as a unit of weight and talked about how we'd decide how many crayons a book weighed.  We also talked about why there are different measures of length: for greater distances, you want a larger unit so that you count in smaller numbers.


This was a great lesson for W because it kept the Daddy lecturing to a minimum in lieu of several small, fun activities.

Marble Run

I plopped a marble on the floor and explained Newton's First Law of Motion to W: a marble standing still will keep standing still until you roll it.  Then I rolled it and explained it keeps rolling until the floor slows it down to a stop.  W was unimpressed by my lecture and insistence that this law is in fact a landmark of scientific achievement and human thought (even if it is obvious to any 6-year-old).  So we spent the next hour putting Newton's Law into action in the form of the marble run, which has since replaced Uno as W's favorite object of play.

Here is one of the runs W created:

Force, Mass, and Acceleration

So it's still a tad early to expose W to the mathematical explication of Newton's Laws of Motion, but that doesn't mean we can't start building an intuition for them.  Now, kids who engage in non-schooled, extraneous, and wasteful activities such as "play" probably build a pretty good intuition on their own.  Perhaps any lesson I design merely risks muddying the mental waters, but in any case, I was not going to pass up an opportunity to heave rocks out of a window.

I asked W whether a light or heavy rock would fall faster, and he thought the heavy rock.  This is a great answer and suggests an intuition that Force is directly proportional to Acceleration.  I suspect this intuition is largely built from physical play, where one learns something like "the harder you push, the faster you go."  When you hold up a heavy object, you feel it push down harder, and as a result you would think it should accelerate faster when released.

But of course, the intuition fails.  W learned that a big rock and little rock will hit the ground at the same time.  The same goes for sticks, plastic balls, and rubber boots.

So what happened?  I explained to W thusly: "gravity acts on all things the same".  Sometimes a bigger Force means a bigger Acceleration, but not always.  In Newton's famous equation F=mA, a bigger force can result if one holds Acceleration constant but increases Mass.

Of course, then I screwed it all up by dropping a rock next to a leaf: "but you also have to think about air sometimes".

Maps in Three

The goal of the first lesson was to produce a scaled map of the interior of our house.  W enjoyed using the tape measure on the walls, and I did the work of translating the measurements to a floormap.  I motivated the lesson by letting W know that we would be using the maps in the second lesson to do treasure hunts.

The treasure hunts were a blast!  I photocopied the map and gave W one of the maps with an X on it.  At the X, he found a candy egg and another map for the next hunt.  I spent a lot of time with W showing him how to orient the map and determine the general area in a room where the X was.

In the third lesson, I printed out Google maps of our town, state, country, and world.  On the town map, I circled our property; on the state map, I circled our town, and so on.  After looking at these maps and discussing them, we went out on the road for a drive around town, with the task for W to navigate our way to the ball field (where we threw a frisbee around) and back.  W did a good job of keeping track of where we were on the map and letting me know what the next road would be, but he had trouble with determining whether a turn would be a left or a right.  Since we were doing a big loop, he eventually learned that every turn we were making was a left turn.

Maps are a great way to learn concepts around abstraction, spatial reasoning, and data visualization.  They also help us explore and learn about the world around us, and they can be employed for activities that are actually fun.  I suspect we'll be seeing lots of maps in future Daddy lessons.

Salt and sugar

During dinner, W asked about the differences between salt and sugar, so we thought up a few experiments and executed these after our main course. 

We began with the sensual experiences of each: how does each look and feel?  How does each smell and taste?  Thinking back, we should have also tried putting our ears up to the little heaps, but I guess we were not expecting any auditory properties.

Having established that sugar tastes sugary and salt tastes salty, we explored how they behave with water.  What happens when a tablespoon of each is mixed into a glass of water?  What happens when a little of each is placed onto an ice cube?

Then we searched ingredient lists to see if various food items had one, both, or neither of salt or sugar as an ingredient.  After a few items, and perhaps a pattern established, we turned it into a game to try to predict the inclusion of salt or sugar.