This was my last full week at the foundation! ☹ It has been so bittersweet: sweet because this week was wonderful and I think very very successful; but of course, bitterly so because it will all be coming to an end so soon. This week I was finally able to dive deeper into science than any of the previous weeks. I taught my students about forces, gravity, and velocity—and they seemed to grasp these complex concepts very well. I showed them many experiments in class about objects falling to the ground. I dropped a marker and a heavy book at the same time, and prior to doing so I asked the children which they think would hit the ground first—most said book, some said marker, and only one student out of all my three batches said “same time”. So then I showed them and I dropped it multiple times so that we could all come to a consensus, and they were all quite surprised to see that the marker and the book hit the ground at the same time. Then I dropped a piece of paper and the marker, and they saw that the paper fell slower. Then I crumpled the paper into a ball, and they were all surprised to see the paper ball and the marker hit the ground at the same time.

Indeed, observation and experiments were a big focus of this week’s lessons. I hope the children have taken away an important lesson: they themselves can test things out in order to learn new things about the word. After all, that is what science is all about!

I think the greatest success this week is stitched into what was initially the biggest challenge this week: teaching the children why the moon goes around the Earth, and doesn’t fall into the Earth instead. This required a little bit of creativity on my part. I realized I needed to show them why this occurs, not merely explain. This way they would be able to see with their own eyes how it works! So I tied a ball at the end of a jump rope, and swung it around me with myself spinning in the middle. I showed the children that only when the velocity of the ball was perpendicular to the force being applied by the string, would the ball move in a circle. If, instead, the ball’s velocity was 0, and I pulled on it with the rope, it would simply fall into me. Or, if its velocity was not 0, but was in a direction along the line of force (again from the rope), the ball would fall in again. This is exactly the same way the moon goes around the Earth: it has nonzero speed and its motion is not in the same direction of the force acting on it (only here the force is gravity), and thus it moves in a circle, and does not fall into the Earth. I was so impressed—I think the children really got it! I was so incredibly happy and excited, because I remember how hard it was for me to understand this difficult concept.

I even had the children try swinging the ball, so they could feel for themselves the force being exerted by the rope. I also had them try swinging the ball at different speeds, and that way they could see that to swing the ball faster around the circle, they needed to pull with the rope harder. They were quite excited by this experiment!

Next week I want to continue this experimentation thread and give them balls of clay, and tell them to try to make the clay float in the water. I think this will add a new and important dimension to our experimentation, because it will be the first time I give the children the opportunity to figure out a way to answer a question themselves!