What have the British Red Cross, Fergus the Farm Yard Dog and hard plastic tubing got in common?
I told my trainees last year never to go past a skip just in case there are little gems waiting to be rescued to be used in some way for the next exciting resource to use in Science.
I would now like to add the multitude of charity shops, of which The British Red Cross is one, to this list of resource opportunities
This week’s lecture, 23.3.10, concerned Sc4 and in particular Sound. While browsing along the shelves in the children’s section in the Red Cross Shop recently, I came across a 25p copy of Fergus the Farm Yard Dog.
For those of you who are not familiar with the story, it is a about a little boy’s adventure in a farm yard. He hears a lot of sounds and is able to identify them when he discovers the cause of each one, but one sound keeps reoccurring at regular intervals, but try as he might he cannot not find its source or identify it.
All the while, however, he is having an exciting time discovering other sounds. Finally he turns a corner in the farmyard and there it is……….
It presents a superb opportunity to introduce Foundation children to Sounds or to consolidate the work with slightly older children.
You will have to visit a Red Cross Shop, however, to get your own copy and find out the culprit in this story!
Now clearly it is also necessary to follow up the story with some investigations and there is no better way to introduce top infants / lower juniors to the transference of sound than to get them to use a “Sound Cannon”. This simply is a short length of hard plastic tubing with a balloon stretched over each end. On one end the balloon is pierced so that it has a very small hole in it.
A lighted candle is set up, with all the safety precautions in place, and the tube is aimed at the lighted candle. The other end of the tube is lightly tapped and a jet of air shoots out of the tube through the hole and extinguishes the candle.
The plastic tubes came from a little company, near where I live, that uses this material in the making of air extraction equipment. As I passed their works outlet, I saw short pieces of this pipe in a bin outside! I had no idea what I would use the tubes for at the time, but experience has shown that you don’t leave opportunities like this begging.
They were more than happy to let me have them. The left over pieces I had, after I made my sound cannons, were ideal for craft activities, especially to use as rolling pins when undertaking clay work!
Harry Young, Early Years PGCE Core Science Subject Tutor, 25.03.10