We loosely did the letter "A" last week, or was it a few weeks ago? I vaguely remember writing "A" on the board and then Rowan drawing penguins....letter "A" fail.
So on to "B"!
This week we made some origami boats to float on the water.
I thought the kids might get a kick out of this because they got to see paper boats float AND play with water.
But mostly I was pretty excited because while boats aren't my favorite (I'm more of an airplane kind of girl :)), I never pass up an opportunity to reference Archimedes, the Greek mathematician who ...hold on while I geek out....among other things, was a forefather of Calculus, figured out the actual value of Pi, and also discovered that when an object is in water, the buoyancy force is equal to the weight of water displaced by the object. And if the buoyancy force is greater than the gravitational force, then the object will float.
This is known as Archimedes' Principle.
It's my second favorite principle, mostly because it's named "Archimedes". (Bernouli's Principle is my most favorite, and not because its named "Bernouli". Look it up. Coincidently, it does start with B!)
To make the boats, I looked up a few different instructions and I found these to be the most straightforward. I still had to help the boys.
And they were a little disappointed that I had to help. But ultimately, we did end up with two paper boats.
Though they didn't last very long.
Cid the Leviathan sunk his pretty quickly by pulling it down to the "sea" floor with his ten massive tentacles and Rowan's slowly took on water over the shallow sides.
We also made bees, using the letter "B" as the shape of the wings.
For this, I cut a bee body out of yellow construction paper and three stripes out of black construction paper. Then I marked letter "B" wings with dash marks for the boys to trace.
I attached templates for this activity below.
- Print the B Wings Printable and the Bee Body Template
- Fold a piece of yellow construction paper and use the Bee Body Template to cut out a bee body
- Cut 3 or 4 stripes from black construction paper
Have the kids:
- Trace the B's
- Paste the bee body onto the B Wings Printable
- Paste the stripes on
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| B Wings Printable |
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| Bee Body Template |
