A few of us met up to do some science this afternoon. The theme was Levers and Pulleys. Having nothing to contribute to the levers and pulleys theme, and having recently rediscovered a container of real borax, I took gloop making ingredients. So we met up in a garden and had a good play.
Clever home-ed dad Mick had made a brilliant balance beam with nails in it to hold weights (they looked like bags of dog poo but apparently they were 1kg bags of sandpit sand). They all experimented with placing different amounts of beams in different places and predicting what would happen and how to make it balance.
Naturally as this is home education not school education you need to involve small children and dogs if at all possible!
We then tried adjusting the pivot point of the balance to make Pete and Eli balance.
Then we experimented with lifting a bucket of sand in various ways.
Some had more success than others.
They did some more experimenting and then spent a couple of hours playing while we drank tea and discussed, well, educating the kids mostly!