Cosmic Ball.

A much more mundane day today. After an early start, even saw the stars twinkling in the night sky when I let the cats into the kitchen, I had quite a hectic morning in school. I had been asked to help the children make some little bugs involving batteries, wires and bulbs. The task was very fiddly and most of them didn't work as the bulbs kept coming loose from the tops of the batteries where they were stuck in place with Blu-tack. I turned the lesson round by getting the children to talk about why the bugs didn't work. Luckily I had brought in my cosmic ball - looks like a ping-pong ball with a pair of contacts but inside is a power source, flashing light and weird buzzer. It is great for demonstrating that a circuit (in our case human) needs to be complete before you can make things work. I let the children build their own circuits using a selection of equipment and we also found out that AA batteries can get hot and burn fingers and even give off smoke! A good example of 'Lets break the circuit by pulling these wires apart.' Even funnier, after the event, was when there was a loud wailing from the carpet. There sat one child who had put a crocodile clip on his finger and not worked out how to open it. The TA and I both tried to get to him but we were hampered by children, chairs and a big box all in our way. By the time we extricated ourselves the child had taken off the clip but how silly can you get? especially when this was the second time in a week this 6 year old had done that.
After my morning's teaching I had to make trip to town to visit the Post Office and to buy some Christmas presents. Combined with a visit to the supermarket that was my afternoon taken care of.