"Ghetto" Pulleys

While I've mostly blogged about my art classes and bulletin board displays, today I have a different subject to blog about - Science.  I never thought I would be teaching science - It is not my strongest subject in any way.  However, I have had a ton of fun teaching science to Grade 2!  Our first unit was on Animals.  While students love animals, and love learning about them, I found this unit hard in the fact that there wasn't much for experiments.  Science is one subject that you can truly do hands on learning, but I found that to be more tough with studying animals.  (If anyone has any ideas for me, please message me!!)  We then had a unit on Matter and Materials.  This unit was great, in the fact that we had an experiment almost every science class!  Learning about solids, liquids, and gases always have engaging activities to do with the students.

Now, we are learning about Simple Machines.  So far we have worked with pushing and pulling forces and inclined planes.  Just recently we worked with pulleys.  Being the procrastinator I am, the night before the lesson I looked everywhere for a good pulley activity...I thought it would be no problem!  Nope, not true.   Everywhere I looked, making a pulley required wooden spools.  Unfortunately, I don't just have wooden spools hanging around...and I especially can't find one the night before the lesson :).   So I decided to make my own pulleys out of some stuff I had in our apartment:  toilet paper rolls, a pizza box, and a glue gun.

They turned out like this:

Here's how I made it:

I took a toilet paper roll and cut it in half.  I then cut out two circles from the pizza box, and with a glue gun I glued them together.  The students simply had to stick a pencil through the middle, put some yarn around the pulley, tie a load to the yarn...and voila!  A pulley!  Mind you, it wasn't the strongest pulley ever, but it did the trick to show the students what a pulley is.  And they had fun with it anyways!

Now, here's hoping for a snowy day tomorrow - too snowy for school perhaps?  Ah...one can only dream.