Elizabeth's Guiding Corner

  This week we combined science and the arts to learn about the science of sound! 7:00pm - Opening and Welcome 7:15pm - Sound Waves We looked at some diagrams of sound waves (From this  slide deck ) and talked about how echoes work, and why small instruments make high sounds and big instruments make low sounds. 7:25pm - Videos We were going to watch some videos of people playing boom whackers and glass bottles (in the slide deck), but to be honest I completely forgot about them. We had some technical difficulties that resulted in the meeting starting a few minutes late, and the girls were ready to start experimenting so we just went straight to that. 7:30pm - Experimenting Once we were done with all the talking, we sent the girls off to experiment. They all brought cups and they filled them with water to make different pitches. I also suggested that they try tapping the cups with different objects to see if they could make different sounds. Then we all shared the songs we...

 This week we finally got around to introducing the Discovery Badges to our Brownies. We decided that the best way to teach them how to earn a badge at home was to earn one as a group. As we did the activities I shared my screen and filled out the Maker badge activity sheet (from the  Discovery Badge activity sheets ) so that the Brownies knew which activities went where. Here's what we did: Connect:  For the connect section we learned about NASA aerospace engineer Tiera Fletcher. We also learned a bit about what aerospace engineers do, and how the things they make help us in our daily lives (like the satellites that make our car GPS work).  Here's the slide deck I used. Create: For the  create section we made paper airplanes. We made two different designs and compared how well they flew ( Here's the instructions for the planes we made ). The plan was that the Brownies would make a modification to one of the planes and see if their modification made it fly bette...

We've done a lot of crafts and arts activities so far this year, so we decided to mix it up a bit with an engineering challenge. As I suggested to my co-Guiders, "Let's launch some stuff!". Before we got into designing and building, I showed them what a catapult is and how they work. We looked at some homemade designs and discussed what items would make a good base, and what we could use as the arm of the catapult. At first I got a lot of blank stares, but they slowly started to come up with some ideas. I put the pictures in a slide deck, which you can find here (the pictures of home made catapults were found on Google Images, they are not my own.):  Catapult Presentation Next we got to building. Everyone started with the same basic supplies that my co-Guider delivered in a supplies drop-off a few weeks earlier. They each got some wooden blocks, rubber bands, popsicle sticks, toothpicks, and some small pieces of foam packaging that we suggested they use as the project...