Unschooling Update aka Who Needs a Water Table?

First of all, I want to say it's hot, like really hot. It only gets super hot in the Portland area a few times a year, but when you don't have air conditioning, it's awful. So I have been watching Craigslist for awhile hoping to find Orion a water table, but they all seem to be expensive or disappear immediately.

Today, we had a hike that got cancelled due to the heat, so I decided to go to the dollar store and add to the tub we have been filling with water. I bought several containers, including the party tray in the picture above. I thought this would be great for sorting and other activities. After talking to Orion about some water principles, I got to thinking I haven't posted recently about anything related to learning. Of course, that is the whole point of unschooling, eh? Trusting that your child will learn on their own. But I do love to expand his experiences.

So... we have been talking about why some things sink and other things float. The party tray turned out to be awesome. At first I suggested sorting, saying we could put shells on the outside and rocks on the inside, or vice versa. But then I had the great idea of filling the middle with water and pressing down on it with a cup. We talked about displacement and why the water was overflowing to the other areas, and then why there was less water in the middle when the cup came out. The other thing we did recently was rolling two objects down a slide and talking about which one got to the bottom first and why.

Yeah, I am an education geek.