Photo Credit: Adam Foster via Compfight
Okay. Here’s the first “un-homework” post. This one will be an ongoing thinking project — science based, literacy flavored. I wanted to get it out there for you ASAP so your child could think about it if he or she wants to. Remember: This kind of creative, project-based “un-homework” is not required, but when I introduced it to the kids today, many seemed very intrigued.
The question is simple, though the answer might be complex:
What type of ball rolls the farthest?
This question was posed by Franki Sibberson, a former fourth grade teacher (now third) in Dublin, OH, on a new website called Solve it Your Way! (I know of her through a wonderful teacher blog called A Year of Reading that she writes with her fifth grade teaching friend, Mary Lee Hahn, a valued virtual “colleague” of mine.) The comment section for this particular question closes in 38 days. It will be fun to see the answers that appear there.
So, that’s the question. Explore the parent-teacher link on that web page for rationale for the projects. I share many of Franki’s goals. Consider our classroom blog as a place you can post your solution to this problem. Franki will link to your solution so others can see. Consider documenting it via video and photographs. Hopefully she’ll get lots of solutions so we can explore how people use science and math to solve problems like this one, and how they use writing, photos, and video to communicate how they got their answers.
We’ll be talking about this project in school in a couple of days. I can imagine running experiments at home or at recess. In the meantime, here are some thinking questions to help begin the project.
- What do you think might happen? What do you think you’ll discover? How will you solve the problem?
- What materials will you need?
- How will you measure the results?
- How will you keep track of the results?
- What challenges do you think you’ll have?
This weekend I’ll post the first thinking we did as a class about this project. Cool stuff, indeed.