Playground Physics

 A flurry of forces have prompted me to be more methodical about creating enrichment activities for Elinor and Gabriel on the one hand and recording them on the other. (I confess that this is the reason for the massive blog-catch-up-push I've been making.) This past Tuesday was our first attempt. 

I had high hopes of performing Playground Physics with my adorable little side-kicks. Every time we go to the park I wonder about acceleration, centripetal and centrifugal forces, gravity, inertia, etc. I don't know enough about any of these things to speak even half coherently about them, but the concept of taking measurements of them seemed super cool. The added concept of a holster memento seemed even cooler. 

Enter reality. The morning of, Elinor was in such a bad mood there was absolutely no holster-making to be had. I was lucky to get them both in the car, actually, and it took a graham cracker bribe to do it. We set off for the Orem All-Together Playground to perform our experiments, using the Physics Toolbox Sensor Suite app  I had downloaded since Google no longer supported the app used in the Playground Physics experiment noted above.

 

As it turned out, Tuesday was the one day a year that this park is closed for cleaning. I confess I had visions of our White Buffalo outing flash through my mind. But, nothing daunting, we set out for another great location: Pleasant Grove's Discovery Park.

To make the reliving of a failed attempt a little shorter, let's just say that we were glad the fifth grade field trip to this park ended when it did because Elinor heard all sorts of expressions she has never heard before or since; the Physics toolbox was about as complicated as running a CNC for my lay understanding, and Gabriel was on the zombie end of the dead or living spectrum thanks to his awaking before 6 am. 

We did manage to memorize Robert Louis Stevenson's lovely little poem, "The Swing" on the way to the park and in between trying to make our graphs. (Elinor was proficient enough at making the graphs, I am just at a total loss as to how to interpret them. So far.) I took this see saw picture thinking I'd ask them to identify which simple machines are actually playground toys, but we haven't gotten that far yet.

As it turned out, Elinor got more physics than she bargained for that day. Abdiel and Gwyn's skate night was that evening, and she had many an unwanted encounter with gravity. She handled it bravely.