Science Club Prep: The Leaning Tower of Pisa

The Book of Massively Epic Engineering Disasters:
33 Thrilling Experiments Based on History's Greatest Blunders
by Sean Connolly

The Leaning Tower of Pisa
1173 CE

2021 notes:
The Book of Massively Epic Engineering Disasters

2022 notes & photos:
The Leaning Tower of Pisa

Preparation:

experiment 5: Will It Tip?

empty 12 oz soda can

water

experiment 6: It's Sinking In

10 sheets of scrap paper

large dictionary

10 hardback books

2 empty egg cartons

Galileo Book Display

Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei
by Peter Sís

Mathematicians Are People, Too: volume 1
by Luetta and Wilmer Reimer

also

supplies for Four Components of Productive Soil



four brown paper bags

Sharpie

$1.00 bill and 20 nickels from The Allowance Game

living houseplant

rock

dish of water

organic material

clear box


supplies for law of falling bodies

plastic Easter eggs

small wooden weights

stool or chair


supplies for law of pendulums

length of string

S-hook

metal washers

stopwatch


Timeline: Science and Discoveries card game

Activities:

read "The Leaning Tower of Pisa" information
from The Book of Massively Epic Engineering Disasters, pp. 29-33

do experiment #5 "Will It Tip?"

do experiment #6 "It's Sinking In"



discuss:
is there an amount of weight that we could put on the living room floor where it would bend or shift? yes, if a huge amount of weight was put on top of the space between the floor joists!

walk barefoot along the upstairs hallway and feel the place where the floor noticably curves underfoot; go into the crawlspace to see the floor joists below the living room floor


explain the Four Components of Productive Soil

note that on a build site, before the foundation is poured, construction equipment will very carefully remove the topsoil in order to get down to the subsoil (the loose fluffy soil that farmers want is the exact opposite of the tightly compacted soil that builders want!)

Extensions:

read "Seeing Isn't Believing" chapter about Galileo Galilei from Mathematicians Are People, Too: volume 1, pp. 45-49

do experiments for Law of Falling Bodies

do experiments for Law of Pendulums

play Timeline: Science and Discoveries

Science Club Prep: Fidenae Stadium

The Book of Massively Epic Engineering Disasters:
33 Thrilling Experiments Based on History's Greatest Blunders
by Sean Connolly

Fidenae Stadium
27 CE

2021 notes:
The Book of Massively Epic Engineering Disasters

2022 notes & photos:
Fidenae Stadium

Preparation:

experiment 3: From the Ground Up

3 bamboo skewers

3 white balls from Zometool set

large pot filled with potting soil

6 paperback books

experiment 4: Weighing the Possibilities

for each team (set up three):

6 sheets of computer paper

tape dispenser

bamboo skewer from previous activity

Styrofoam coffee cup

small ball of string

pair of scissors

ruler

2 large paper clips

2 identical card table chairs

several handfuls of glass gems (instead of pennies)

Ancient Rome Book Display

What Life Was Like When Rome Ruled the World: The Roman Empire, 100 BC - AD 200
Time-Life Books

City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction
by David Macaulay

A Roman Fort (Inside Story)
by Fiona Macdonald

The Technology of Ancient Rome (Ancient Innovations)
by Naomi V. McCullough

also

Nienhuis Montessori Roman Arch

Updated Notes:

We finally mastered Experiment 3!

In my notes from last time, you can see how much we struggled with the setup of this experiment. This time we used bamboo skewers and the little balls from a Zometool set. For the Tuesday group, I had us put the white balls into the soil. But we weren't able to get more than one book to stay.

The skewers twist dramatically when they fall, which helps the children to see why the stadium collapsed both outward and inward as it fell down.

Then a student in the Wednesday group finally figured out the secret!

The flat end of the skewer goes into the potting soil, and the pointed end (with the Zome ball) sticks up! The balls spread out the force from the pile of books. And she really stuck with it, determined to balance all the books...

Hooray!

Number Bases in Montessori: Binary Mat & Octal Mat

My oldest student started the year with an exploration of Number Bases (Jamie York suggests doing this in Waldorf in grade 8; I didn't learn it until my math teacher training at Smith). We focused on Binary and Octal.

The Number Bases page on my website gives a number of resources; here, I want to focus on the new Montessori-inspired Not-Golden Mats we made for the classroom! The original Golden Mat material looks like this:

It is base-10, and it uses a set of Colored Bead Material that goes up to 9 (the highest possible digit in any place value).

With base-2, the mat would be green (the Montessori color coding for two). The only beads you would use would be the 1-bars. This is because 1 is the highest possible digit in any place value in the binary system. The place value headings across the top of the mat would also be different:

BINARY

n⁰ = 1
n¹ = 2
n² = 4
n³ = 8
n⁴ = 16
n⁵ = 32
n⁶ = 64

and so on, multiplying the value of the column by 2 each time

Figuring these out is a wonderful exercise for the childen, and we were very pleased with the resulting felt mat.

In a traditional classroom setting, it would be very easy for each student to make their own Binary Mat using a sheet of large green construction paper. Simply place a bead in a section to show a 1; an empty section is a 0.

It's fun to see all the zeroes and ones change as you count up from 1 to 20!

We also made an octal mat, which was super helpful for Jamie's Number Bases Practice Sheet #2 (PDF sample from Jamie's grade 8 workbook ).

Note: It works out really well for base-8 to read Weslandia by Paul Fleischman first!

For base-8, the mat would then logically be made of a dark brown felt, and we removed the extra bead bars from my Decanomial Bead Bar Box so that we didn't have anything higher than 7. Here are the place value headings:

OCTAL

n⁰ = 1
n¹ = 8
n² = 64
n³ = 512
n⁴ = 4,096
n⁵ = 32,768
n⁶ = 262,144

In my experience, it works best to use the Multi-Base Bead Frame when converting from decimal to the other number base (base-2 to base-16) and the Not-Golden Mats when converting from another number base to decimal.

For example, 37_oct would be represented by a 3-bar in the 8s place and a 7-bar in the 1s place. 3 x 8 is 24, and 24 + 7 is 31_dec.

Oops, One More... Tree Bingo

Yesterday I finished my Botany Books post and was feeling all proud of myself. Then, walking down the hall at the end of the day to close the door of the Board Games closet, my eye fell upon Laurence King's Tree Bingo.
I pulled out the box, and what do you think was on the front?? Date Palm!

AARGH, I thought. We did that plant last week! But, of course, we can play the game at any time to help review the trees we've learned. Here are all the trees in the box (as with their other games, a fact booklet is included):

Alder (Alnus glutinosa)

Ash (Fraxinus excelsior)

Banyan (Ficus macrophylla)

Basswood (Tilia americana)

Beech (Fagus sylvatica)

Blue Quandong (Elaeocarpus angustifolius)

Bois Dentelle (Elaeocarpus bojeri)

Bottle (Pachypodium lealii)

Candelabra (Euphorbia ingens)

Cedar (Cedrus libani)

Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum)

Coco-de-Mer (Lodoicea maldivica)

Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens)

Date Palm (Phoenix dactylifera)

Dragon's Blood (Dracaena cinnabari)

Durian (Durio zibethinus)

Field Maple (Acer campestre)

Frankincense (Bowsellia sacra)

Giant Redwood (Sequoiadendron giganteum)

Grandidier's Baobab (Adansonia grandidieri)

Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna)

Hazel (Corylus avellana)

Holly (Ilex aquifolium)

Jacaranda (Jacaranda mimosifolia)

Juniper (Juniperus communis)

Kapok (Ceiba pentandra)

Kauri (Agathis australis)

Larch (Larix decidua)

London Plane (Platanus x hispanica)

Madrone (Arbutus menziesii)

Maidenhair (Ginkgo biloba)

Monkey Puzzle (Araucaria araucana)

Nordmann Fir (Abies nordmanniana)

Oak (Quercus robur)

Olive (Olea europaea)

Orange (Citrus x sinensis)

Paperbark (Melaleuca quinquenervia)

Pecan (Carya illinoinensis)

Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides)

Quiver (Aloidendron dichotomum)

Rainbow Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus deglupta)

Rowan (Sorbus aucuparia)

Sandbox (Hura cerpitans)

Sassafras (Sassafras albidum)

Saucer Magnolia (Magnolia x soulangeana)

Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris)

Shagbark Hickory (Carya ovata)

Silver Birch (Betula pendula)

Spruce (Picea abies)

Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua)

Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus)

Traveller's Palm (Ravenala madagascariensis)

Tulip (Liriodendron tulipifera)

Tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica)

Upas (Antiaris toxicaria)

Walking Palm (Socratea exorrhiza)

Walnut (Juglans regia)

Whistling Thorn (Vachellia drepanolobium)

Wild Apple (Malus sieversii)

Wisteria (Wisteria sinensis)

Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis)

Wych Elm (Ulmus glabra)

Yew (Taxus baccata)

Yoshino Cherry (Prunus x yedoensis)

What's in My Botany Books

First, I would like to update everyone that I'm no longer an Amazon Affiliate.

I cancelled my entire Amazon account last night after seeing news items about their invasive "About You" page and the new glasses their delivery drivers will be wearing to take constant photos of the path to your front door (that you cannot opt out of) which they can then use to train their humanoid delivery robots. This means that while in the past I spent a lot of time tracking down Amazon links to the specific books I was recommending, I will no longer be supplying links to purchase materials. I get most of my curriculum things used on eBay anyway, but Amazon was so pervasive that I felt those links were actually helpful to people. Now that so many people are boycotting Amazon, there's no reason for me to take the time.

End rant.

Instead of using a prepared Botany curriculum with a specifically laid out scope & sequence, we are just doing plants as they come onto our radar. They drop nuts, bear fruit, change colors, open flowers, give us a rash, etc. And we want to learn about them!

This means I need to look at my Botany books in a new light, and simply note which plants are covered in each. When we choose a plant, I can go to this blog post and hit "Find" to see if I have any resources for it.

The Burgess Book of Nature Lore
by Thornton W. Burgess

chapter 3
"Tommy's Insect Soup" - pitcher plant

I also wrote up a 2023 blog post detailing the Bloodthirsty Plants series.

Animal and Plant Anatomy
11 volume encyclopedia

vol. 1 - apple tree

vol. 2 - diatom, fern

vol. 4 - hawkmoth, honeybee

vol. 6 - marsh grass, mushroom, orchid

vol. 7 - potato

vol. 8 - saguaro cactus, seaweed, sequoia

vol. 10 - Venus flytrap, weevil

Diatoms and mushrooms are not plants, but we may end up talking about them and why they are not plants, so I want to remember that they're included. The hawkmoth and honeybee are pollinators; the weevil is a pest.

Drawing from the Book of Nature
by Dennis Klocek

chapter 11, "The Leaf"

11.1 - pinnate & lanceolate (willow), cordate (violet, morning glory)
11.2 - round or lobe-shaped (mallow), dentate (nettle)
11.3 - white oak, vetch, clover, cranesbill, carrot

chapter 12 - "Algae, Fungi, Lichen, Ferns"

12.1 - algae (bull kelp, fucus "rockweed")
12.3 - fern, horsetail

chapter 13 - "Higher Plants"

13.1 - bean, pussy willow
13.2 - plum - a perfect flower
13.3 - conifer (pine)
13.4 - tree growth
13.5 - venation (sycamore, maple, willow, poplar, birch)
13.6 - foliage shading
13.7 - live oak
13.8 - cottonwood
13.9 - birch
13.10 - fir
13.11 - apple

chapter 14 - "The Flowering Plants"

14.1 - shepherd's purse, cranesbill, storksbill
14.2 - crucifer (radish, burnip, mustard, cabbage, broccoli)
14.3 - bulbs (narcissus, jonquil, daffodil, crocus, amaryllis)
14.4 - rose
14.6, 14.7, 14.8, 14.9 - grasses (oat)
14.10 - legumes (peas, lentils, peanuts, beans)
14.11 - composites (sunflower, zinnia)

New Eyes for Plants: A Workbook for Observing and Drawing Plants
Margaret Colquhoun & Axel Ewald

an absolutely lovely book of seasonal art lessons!

chapter 1 - Late Autumn
potato, beech, groundsel, rose

chapter 2 - Winter
iceflowers, hogweed, oak

chapter 3 - Early Spring
snowdrop, horse chestnut, beech, tulip, daffodil, groundsel

chapter 4 - Late Spring / Early Summer
broad bean, sunflower, groundsel, cuckoo flower, musk mallow, charlock

chapter 5 - Midsummer
chamomile, peony, sow thistle, dog-rose, creeping buttercup, columbine

chapter 6 - Early Autumn
apple, beech, horse chestnut, wild cherry, vetch, buttercup, rose

chapter 7

yarrow, chrysanthemum, bramble, hawthorn

metamorphosis within the Brassica family:
Brussels sprout, cabbage, kale, cauliflower, kohlrabi

metamorphosis within the Rose familiy:
apple, rosehip, strawberry, blackberry, cherry

For my notes doing this block using Thomas Elpel's books, see Resources & Presentation Order for Plant Families. In that 2021 block I focused on Shanleya's Quest & Shanleya's Quest 2: Botany Adventure at the Fallen Tree

Matching Memory Games - Botany Edition

While working on my Botany planning for October, I found an old note about a Horse Chestnut card in Match a Leaf: A Tree Memory Game.

That inspired me to inventory all the plants included in all three Botany memory games!

First up we have Gardener's Match, which is largely a matching game between the whole plant and the edible food it produces. In an interesting twist, there are also two special cards (poison ivy & stinging nettle). If you turn over one, you lose your turn. If you turn over both, you lose the game!

Next up we have Double Take: Plants & Flowers. To the best of my knowledge, this game is out of print. An old copy was donated years ago.

In this matching game you pair the image of a flower with its close up.

The set includes Wonder Flower, Amaryllis, Hibiscus, Rose, Mum, Aster, Painted Daisy, Transvaal Daisy, Bougainvillea, Blue Hydrangea, Wax Plant, Loosestrife, Iris, Carnation, Lantana, Friesia, Hypericum, Blue Tit, Cyclamen, Flamingo Plant, Snap Dragon, Star Lily, Day Lily, Peruvian Lily, Moth Orchid, Sunflower, Scarlet Trumpet, Marigold.

Finally we have Match a Leaf: A Tree Memory Game. Like Gardener's Match, this game is made by Laurence King! Here you match the entire tree -- helpful for practicing identifying trees at a distance -- with a leaf picture.

The set includes

Red Maple (Acer rubrum)

Grandidier's Baobab (Adansonia grandidieri)

Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum)

Monkey Puzzle (Araucaria araucana)

European White Birch (Betula pendula)

Shagbark Hickory (Carya ovata)

European Chestnut (Castanea sativa)

Swamp Gum (Eucalyptus regnans)

European Beech (Fagus sylvatica)

European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior)

Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba)

English Holly (Ilex aquifolium)

English Walnut (Juglans regia)

Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua)

Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera)

Olive (Olea europaea)

Scotch Pine (Pinus sylvestris)

London Plane (Platanus x hispanica)

English Oak (Quercus robur)

Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra)

Sassafras Tree (Sassafras albidum)

Coastal Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens)

Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum)

European Mountain Ash (Sorbus aucuparia)

Scotch Elm (Ulmus glabra)

Now when I search my blog for the name of a particular plant, this post will pop up and I will remember that I have these resources!

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