Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Alberta Arts Challenge 2016



It's that time of the year again - the Alberta Arts Challenge!  Every year they come out with a new theme, which makes this a great challenge crest for every year.  This year's challenge is centred around Canada, which makes this a great time for us, as we've just completed the All About Canada badge.

We had the girls decorate some cookies for Valentine's day.  We had them draw Canadian symbols on at least one.

Songs - we had Nana Owl come in tonight - she's a retired Guider, but she's also a wonderful songsmith, and does a lot of music education, and graciously came in to sing with the girls.  

She sang the Our Cabana song, the Our Chalet song, along with a song in Spanish and another in German.

She also had the girls make a few musical instruments.  They made a clacker with a long stick, electrical tape, and tin with holes in them, as well as a wooden spoon rattle, with two bells to make noise.



Then we did some dancing.  The girls were taught a polka, the Mexican hat dance, and a gigue.


Finally we passed out Valentines between the girls, and gave Nana Owl a great howl sendoff.

Thursday, February 4, 2016

STEM Challenge


Today we finished up the STEM challenge.  We decided to do a modified version of this challenge - but for the full challenge click on the badge above!

To begin - we did some astronomy last week (and counted it for this challenge).

This week we started by making goop with cornstarch, water, and a few drops of food colouring.  We mixed it, allowed the girls to poke at it, then put it over a speaker and turned up the bass.  It's a non-Newtonian substance.  So it's solid when you poke at it/hit it with soundwaves and it's a liquid when it isn't.


Then we divided into three groups.

Sparkle Owl helped the kids fold themselves paper airplanes and had the girls run races with them down the length of the room.

Tawny Owl ran the microscope.  Our local library (after having you sign that if you break it you bought it) will allow you to borrow their really nice microscope, along with 25 pre-prepared slides.  The girls got to look at a blood smear, corn root tip, a penicillum and some other cool slides.

I ran the snap circuits station.  We can also borrow one from the library, and I have a copy, so in our groups we were able to have the girls work in pairs to complete some of the experiments.  Here's the link.  Using the kit they were able to make some electrical circuits - minimally they all got through making a light turn on, a motor spin and a sound start.