At Studio Sprout we love ART! But science is a close second so we have been exploring those passions in the studio. Our focus this week was gravity. We investigated gravity and its effects with splatter painting and cardboard tube engineering.
Our three Gravity projects included:
- Splat/Drop Painting
- Marble Run Engineering
- A reading of Gravity by Jason Chin
Materials:
- Sand
- Hosiery
- Watered Down Tempura Paint
- Paper
- Box and drop cloth to capture splatter
Optional:
- Contact Paper (we cut out hearts to tie in Valentines day and removed them when the paint dried)
Splat Painting
This was very open for the kiddos to play and really explore. The texture of the paint sand bag was new, and they got to experiment with dropping from different heights to create smaller or larger splats.
We armed the students with aprons and cardboard boxes to help contain some of the splatter.
Marble Run Engineering
Materials:
- Marbles
- Cardboard Tubes
- Tape (washi, masking, duct)
- Space in which to tape the tubes
First things first, round up your best and brightest marble wall engineers, and set them to work. Any tunnel will work if you have enough tape!
We added to the wall with every class over a week! We saw amazing growth and tunnel ingenuity. It helps to have containers at the end of the run to catch the marbles.
One aspect that the children really enjoyed was tbeing able to play and create simultaneously. They could run a marble through a tube and then decorate the tube or add to it. The play and the art were intertwined.
Almost as fun as the marble running, was the tube decorating.
It’s fun to create side by side “tube races”.
Gravity Reading
After seeing gravity demonstrated in the studio, it gave students clarity and a means of understanding what gravity actually does; it makes things fall down.
