I'm Brenda, and I care for ten children in my home,
ages three to five.
Science is all about investigation and discovery.
Kids learn by coming up with ideas and then testing
and trying them out.
Yay!
BRENDA: I put a lot of thought into our learning centers.
I provide different materials for the children to play with,
depending on what I want them to discover.
I want to make sure
that they have a great environment to explore.
At our ramp testing center, the children investigated
sending objects down ramps with different textures.
When I pushed the car here, it stays there.
If I put the car here, it zooms down.
BRENDA: Our tubes and ramps building center
gave the children a chance to create their own tracks
and test them out with marbles.
The children could change the layout of the foam pipe tracks,
giving it different twists and turns.
They could really see how moving the track
changed the motion and the speed of the marbles.
The kids could've sent marbles down these tracks all day.
I made sure to set up learning centers outdoors as well.
Driveway bowling was a big hit with the children.
Driveways and sloped yards make great ramps
because they're big enough to run and play on.
I also created a ramp center at our sensory table
by shaping the sand into a hill.
The children immediately started
sending their golf balls down the slope.
And they made their own tracks and ramps in the sand.
In our yard, we do have a nice little slope,
so we've created a center using hard, wooden boards
and flexible paper as ramps.
This really drove home the point
that objects move differently on different surfaces.
Having the kids explore ramps in different ways
through all the learning centers
really helps reinforce the core science concepts.
And of course, giving the children the freedom
to follow their own interests makes it all the more fun.
Show me how you launch the marble.
Whoa!