Week Three

Pizza Box Ovens- The ovens made the previous week, were tested out twice this week. First with s'mores and the next day with nachos. The oven was able to melt the chocolate and cheese, and the marshmallow somewhat. A multimeter, borrowed from an engineer parent, tested the temperature to over 50 degrees centigrade. One girl made her own solar oven with stones that were on the playground. She added some black paper and foil and was able to successfully melt a crayon!

Your Body and Energy- Ms. Paige, a student at the department of Kenisiology and a CYC aide, presented a power point to the children called, "How Our Bodies Get, Make, and Use Energy". She broke it down into four steps, Eat Food, Digest Food, Make ATP, and Use ATP. She talked about how sugar gives you a rush but it is short lived whereas other foods stay with you longer. Children shared their knowledge of sugar with her and added that it was not good for your teeth.

Yoga- Ms. Bowman, CYC teacher, certified yoga instructor, and camp administrator, delighted the class with a yoga lesson. She was able to tie it all into our body energy lesson and she even found some poses for the children to do that could help "energize them". One of the favorite parts of the yoga class came at the end when Ms. Bowman carefully placed a Beanie Baby on the backs of each child as they sat in Child's Pose and breathed. Later the children held their Beanie Baby on their tummies as they finished some final breathing exercises.

Wind- Children pondered what type of energy wind might be and came up with the action of the sun, or thermal energy, along with the rotation of the Earth. The teacher read a book called, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, about an African boy who learned about wind mills from a book, and went about making one to help his village gain electricity and to help run a pump to water the crops. Children also experimented with wind and made a makeshift wind tunnel from a box fan and an old pretzel jar. They discovered that feathers worked the best and that pom poms were too heavy to get any lift. To explore the properties of wind more, campers made pinwheels and paper airplanes . Pinwheel makers found you needed to blow into the pocket of paper to get the wheel to turn.

Wind Tunnel- After swimming, campers walked down Stadium Drive to the Glen L. Martin Wind Tunnel. There Dr. Andrew Lind met the Blue Room and showed the children a map of where they would be going in the building. First a model of the wind tunnel was shown so that everyone could understand how the machine worked. A large fan blew though the tunnel with a model plane that sported tufts of material which fluttered in the wind. Ben Strobel showed the children how the tufts changed according to how he rotated the airplane. Strobel talked about the many things that are tested in the tunnel including the item that was there this day, a box. He explained how the wind blew through in a vortex similar to that of a toilet.

This made another connection because the children had been playing with two connected soda bottles filled with water, that when shaken would create a vortex. The exciting part of the tour was getting to crawl down into the tunnel and run up and down the angled walls. Strobel moved the giant fan for the children to see and told them it was recycled from an old B-29 WWII plane.

The camp music teacher, Ms. Ojukwu, brought her guitar and drum in and talked to the children about how sound makes waves and how their voice worked. She showed pictures of vocal cords and amazed the children by singing a bit of opera, which she is trained in. She compared the guitar to that of a human bosy and had the children put their hands on their chest to feel the air coming in and out. Before she left Ms. Ojukwu, did an experiment by trying to get rice, that whas sitting on top of a plastic stretched over a bowl, to vibrate. First the drum, then her voice, and finally the guitar made the rice visibly vibrate to the astonishment of the children.

Sound and Music Instruments- Heyni Solera, a graduate student from the ethnomusical department at the UMD, came to share her bandoneon and talk about how it produces different sound. She opened the instrument up to show the children the reeds inside and explained how the bellows were squeezed to make the sound. Solera demonstrated how she created many different sounds with the bandoneon just by vibrating different parts of her body, such as her knees and wrists.