Hawks Spring into Innovation: From Weather Stations to Slime Celebrations
- Red Fox Community School
- 20 hours ago
- 3 min read
by Kristin Finch
At Red Fox Community School, we have a theme that runs throughout the year, invention and innovation was this year's theme and lent itself to many fascinating discoveries. We read stories, studied simple machines and how they affect so many things we use daily. We played innovation games, used our ideas to create new structures in our outside forest area and explored areas of science. Do you know what a non-newtonian fluid is? The Hawks do! We explored things like oobleck and Heinz ketchup and then made our own slime, which when at just the right consistency, performs like a nonnetonian fluid. The Hawks had so much fun with the slime, they asked to do it again as a celebration at the end of the year!
Our most recent read aloud, Zeek the Weather Geek was a fun and silly story about a boy obsessed with weather and getting a St. Bernard puppy. He ends up with a lizard instead and his dad is away studying penguins in Antarctica. He deals with disappointment, with conflicts with others, and creates his own weather station, teaching us many concepts along the way. The Hawks were able to share their feelings of disappointment, times when they miss someone who is far away, and how they can express these emotions. It also inspired some great experiments like changing the air pressure to suck a hard boiled egg into a bottle.
The school used all of this information about invention and innovation and wrote it into our play, Press the Button: Spinning Through Time - Three Revolutions of Innovation. This play was imagined, written, researched and performed by students. It took place during multiple time periods where someone from the present day returned to the past and learned about inventions like the wheel, the They created the props and many of the costumes. It showcased not only everything they learned during our study of invention and innovation, but also their creativity, humor and stewardship for our world.
The year long study of kindness in the Hawks came to an end with a big slime party. While kindness can be a complicated concept to really grasp, at RFCS we strive to help everyone truly understand how to be kind. We model how to treat one another, play-act kind scenes, and we try to observe kindness. The Hawks worked on ‘catching’ each other doing something kind. In our closing meeting we take a turn saying something we saw someone else do that was kind, and would all think together. After finding each other being kind for many days in a row, we celebrated with a huge slime party! First we mixed basic slime with glue and ‘Magic Liquid.’ Then each Hawk was able to create their own personal slime. We had glow in the dark powder, color agents, model magic to make cloud slime, and little objects to add in. The high light was experimenting with the black light flashlight and glow in the dark powder!
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