Nia002's blog

Today we had to learn new activities to teach our kids next week, we teach on mondays and tuesdays and we learn activities on wednesdays and thursdays. This week we had to learn quick since we were off yesterday. We always practice our activities to the rest of the group before teaching it to the kids to make sure that we have all the kinks worked out. We always want to have our best presentations when the kids are here.

We recently started the summer at the main building. So far we have went to a star show, the omnimax, the life science lab and explored more parts of the science center. We started teaching this week on monday and tuesday. The activities we did were a scavenger hunt and planet related activities. We learned new activities for next week that I am ready to teach.

Today in lab we learned about a list of famous astronauts, one of them was even a dog. We learned about their lives accomplishments and the reasons why they were famous. Most of them were the first to do things for example the first animal to orbit the earth, the first teacher, the first african american, and even the first to walk on the moon. We learned a lot about these people that we never would have thought of. One of the astronauts was Buzz Aldrin, the group that presented on him told us that i was a written fact that buzz lightyear got his name from the astronaut. He however got no recognition because his name was not copyrighted.

Today we made exo-planets. Exo-planets are planets that are not in our solar system. We made up planets how we wanted to and designed models of them then presented.

We were finishing up a second part of our activity from last week. This week the payload was a satellite. We made our satellites out of a toilet paper roll and a variety of other things like: puff balls, q tips, packing peanuts, and toothpicks. We designated one item for each of the following: heat sensor, camera, or gravity probe. Most groups had failure but my group pretty much got it on the first go around. This activity was about deductive reasoning.

Today we made rockets in astronomy. My partner and i used two balloons on either side of the straw and were the only team to succeed in making our rocket reach the end of the string. Next we had to make our rocket carry a cup half filled with beans and rice. We didnt succeed at that but made it 2,3 of the way there.

In our component we always have cool icebreakers that get our brains going in the morning. It's always a good thing, especially since we have to be here at 8:30. Our supervisors do a good job of picking icebreakers that will be both fun and educational. One that we really like is Taboo. The game sometimes gets competitive but it's all for good. We learn how to better think on our feet and find different ways and words to us to get our point across. I hope other components have as much fun as we do during our icebreakers, getting our brains going for the day.