Mad Scientists Club: Animal Adaptations

  • Program Goals
    • Learn about animal adaptions and the science behind them
    • Attendance: 25
Project: Gliding
  • Supplies
    • Paper (misc. and tissue paper)
    • Pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks
    • Scissors, tape, staples
    • Ladder
  • Learn about gliding animals by creating your own and launching it from the ladder
Project: Feathers
  • Supplies
    • feathers
    • popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners
    • paper
    • scissors, tape, staples
    • markers
  • Create and explore with feathers. (I could add oil and dip them in water, but I didn't want to.)
Project: Build a Reptile
  • Beads, pipe cleaners
Experiment: Am I a tortoise or a turtle?
  • pools (outside weather permitting) filled with water
  • Make turtles and tortoises -test them in the water
  • Supplies
    • Styrofoam plates
    • Popsicle sticks
    • Cardstock (scrap paper)
    • glass beads (weight)
    • Scissors, packing tape, duct tape
    • Permanent markers
  • Poster - turtles vs. tortoises, whiteboard to add more facts
Evaluation
  • 2-20-18 (Gliding)
    • Attendance: 25
    • Notes: I split the room with the teen parents group. There was a lot of coming and going. The most popular thing was throwing stuff off the ladder! I wanted to have a lot more info out for gliding animals etc. but I simply didn't have time.
  • 2017 (Turtles)
    • Attendance: 13
    • Notes: I had it better planned, but half my supplies were sequestered in the basement to which I did not have access. I'm going to do an updated "animal adaptions" version of this later in the spring, but I think this program overall may be dying a slow death.
  • 6-26-14 (Turtles)
    • Attendance: 80
    • Notes: I got the ideas for this from a class I took at the Milwaukee Zoo. It didn't really "gel" in my head, so I wasn't sure how it would turn out. However, it went really well. One of the middle schoolers attending knew how to make little geckos out of beads and showed a lot of the kids (and moms) how to do it, and I had another middle school volunteer who helped things run smoothly. One of my aides ran the outdoor portion. A couple kids came up with the idea to "sew" their plates together with pipe cleaners.

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