24.2.09
Kaden's teacher is fabulous at coming up with hands on projects to reinforce the concepts they are learning about. They just finished a unit on simple machines, and their final assignment was to make a catapult that could throw a fun size candy bar using some of the ideas they had learned. It could be anything and any size they wanted. (the only rule was no plastic spoons allowed. I thought that was kind of funny.) There would be a contest to see which one would throw the furthest.
This couldn't be more Kaden if you tried.
I have never seen him more excited for a school project.
When he came home, he wanted to get right to work. We went over to my parents, (my dad is a grown up version of Kade and was just as excited,) and the two of them got busy thinking and planning.
Kade is a brilliant thinker full of amazing ideas, He can look at something and figure out how it works and how he can make it better. But.... he is lousy with patients. This was the perfect thing to help him master the art of trial and error. He had two weeks before he had to bring it to school and he used the whole time thinking and revising until he got it just exactly right.
The end result was pretty cool. It was all engineered by him with a few, tiny hints from Dad and Grandpa. Those candy bars really flew. He took 4th place out of the entire 3rd grade! The winning catapults were cool, but I suspect there may have been more than a few hints offered as help, if you know what I mean. ;) Kades was all his own and we couldn't have been prouder.
Now if I could just get him as excited about his next project which is to dress up as Leonardo di Vinci......
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I like the candy bar idea..food always makes things more fun! Ben made a fish feeder using pulley's for his simple machine project..highlight of Ben's year last year!