Hello All!

This week in Forest School we have taken inspiration from Gever Tully’s Tinkering school.   Watch some bits of this video of his to get the idea…  (and spot the caterpillar!)

We released a handful of balls (we used marbles, ball bearings and ping pong balls, you can use any that you have) down a shallow slope and then observed what happened.  We recorded it using the slow motion function on the phone so we could really study how they travelled.

 

I’m sure you’ll agree it was pretty unspectacular. An epic fail.

We thought our slope wasn’t slopey enough, there was too much leaf litter in the way and some of the balls weren’t heavy enough.

What we needed was excellent brains and after time, resilience, flexibility and lots more epic fails we came up with smoother grooves, ramps and walls, engineering using anything we could find outside…

What could you do in your outside space?

How is the activity different when you do it inside? You could make ramps from toilet rolls, newspaper, toy train track, cardboard packaging…  You could use toy cars or hexbugs instead of balls…

I’d love to see and hear how you get on! Send me your photos  and let me know if you are happy for me to share them on here.

We’ll also share how we get on with this in school this week…

Have fun, Miss B x