science project......homework from outerdarkness

For the last couple of months Hannah and I have been working on her science project. (Don't we look like we are having fun?!!) She wanted to see how high bouncy balls bounced. Her teacher didn't approve it though, so we changed it around a bit until it was. Her final question was,

Does size of the ball and the height at which the ball drop effect how
high the ball will bounce?"

We video taped her bouncing 7 balls, 4 times each, at different heights.

It was a long process, but the data that we collected will probably change the world as we know it! No longer will the Boss family buy big bouncy balls thinking that they will bounce higher than smaller ones, unless we are bouncing them on carpet then, and only then, would we want big ones. Interesting stuff.....causes the mind to think.

When putting together the presentation portion of this project, it didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped. We had an incident with the "free" graph program I downloaded from the Internet. It would only allow you to print twice. Curses!! When we were finished typing up all of the information we had Alan look it over. Doing what he does best, he started changing some things around to make it better. I had to remind him a couple of times that it needed to look like a 3rd grader wrote it. I think the hardest part was to not completely take over. Alan made the comment that he would give "me" an A+ for this project.

To be truthful in all things.......I really didn't enjoy this process at all. In fact if I never had to do it again, I would be very happy! Just getting the question approved was a trial. Hannah said, "I could just do this again for my project next year!" Wouldn't that just make life so much easier! I explained that you can't do that, because they want you to do a different one every year. So then she said, "Then we can let Peter use it." Too much work for one project, even a third grader can recognize that! I just thought of a fabulous idea.....if they had no other homework for the three weeks while we worked on the science project, I could handle that. But unfortunately no one asked for my thoughts or opinions!! Anyway, it did make it all worth it when last night about 9:00 p.m. (two hours past bedtime) Hannah said, "This night is really special Mom. Thanks for helping me." That comment alone made it all worth it.