Science Experiments: Making CRATERS

Such a lovely activity for my kids! We had fun dropping balls of all sizes here and there.  

Objective:
1.  To identify the type of surface where craters are formed.

Materials Needed:

an aluminum foil, the bigger the better

soft material like a newspaper, a rug or towel

balls or rocks

Procedure:
1.  Lay the soft material in the ground like a newspaper a rug or a towel.
2.  On top of it, lay the foil.

3.  Stand at the edge of the foil and drop the ball or rock at the center of the foil.  Note be decided to use the mini basketball because we realized that golf balls made a small impact.
4.  Repeat this process on a hard floor.  This time it was Vito’s turn to drop the ball.

5.  Examine both pieces of the foil.
Findings:
The ball that was dropped in the foil on a soft surface (first image below) made a larger impression compared to the foil lying on a hard floor (second image).  You can immediately see the impression when the ball is dropped in a soft surface!  Look at them, they look like craters!

You can barely see an impression here, but Vito did dropped the ball a few times.
What happened?
The ball that was dropped in the softer surface sank, allowing more of the ball to be pressed against the foil.  In effect, this created those “holes” in the foil.  This is similar to the case of a meteorite (stone or metal in space) when striking a soft surface, it creates a larger imprint that are shaped like holes called craters.  Craters are best formed when meteorites strikes soft, powdery surfaces like that in the moon!  Why not check out real pictures of the surface of the moon from NASA!

You might also want to check our previous science experiments:

• Why do stars twinkle?
• Solubility of different substances in water.

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Learning the Timeline of European History

I am so excited to share with you our approach on learning the timeline of European history. As I mentioned earlier, my son is obsessed with world history, especially with the events in Europe and Asia (his home continent!) so while he is at it I grabbed the opportunity to discuss the great history of Europe. To achieve this, I created these beautiful timeline cards which contain bold pictures (because kids are attracted to pictures) and include a brief description of each event in history.  I thoroughly researched these and handpicked the major events that were included in the cards.  We were always reading the books of the Story of the World series, but most of the events in the cards were not included in the book.

Europe Continent Study for Grade Schoolers

We are revisiting our Europe study, this time I’ve decided to take it by regions.  But before we dive into that, we reviewed some of the things we’ve learned in the past years.

Europe Continent Study: European Regions

Here’s a new study for this year, learning Europe through its regions.  Here I was showing Mavi the divisions and the boundaries in the map.  I bought this map years ago at Montessori Print Shop.  So we’re doing a color code here based on our map in Europe in a Nutshell.  Blue for northern Europe, red for western Europe, green for eastern Europe and orange for southern Europe.

FREE Safari Toob Tree Matching Cards

Download here or click the image.
Vito uses these cards a lot in my post on TREE ACTIVITIES and even in random days, he would pick this up from shelf and work on it.
You can get the Safari Toob Tree miniature objects from here.