Simple Machines

As part of our Iditarod-inspired arctic study, we read the FIAR book Very Last First Time, about an Inuit girl who is finally old enough to gather mussels under the sea ice at low tide - all by herself. Little Man was nervous when she wandered too far and the tide started coming in, but it turned out alright.

There are so many great lessons in this book:

• crisis thinking and what to do in an emergency
• tides
• Inuit culture
• maturity and having to wait for things
• handling fear
• inuksuks
• and simple machines.

At the end of our time with this book, we did a mini-unit on simple machines. We used the book, Experiments with Simple Machines, which had some fun and very simple activities using mostly things we had around the house.

We also watched a Bill Nye video on simple machines and found an online game here.

And finally did some experimenting with Little Man's gear set.