Week # 22

How does a car work?

I asked the kids how do they think the car works. They all had 15 minutes to write down what they thought was happening, they weren’t allowed to do any research. The idea is to figure out what happens inside a black box and creatively reverse engineer how they think it all works. The answers were reasonable but the kids generally struggled beyond the steering and the pedals.

Device Usage

This week we kicked off by collecting the time spent on devices. Here are the numbers:

• Anaya – 6 hours 15 minutes
• Ahmad – 17 hours (4 hours PS4 + 13 hours phone)
• Mahnoor – 7 hours and 25 minutes
• Shaherbano – 7 hours and 30 minutes
• Alamgir – 7 hours
• Saba – 9 hours
• Zubair – 17 hours and 26 minutes

Given that some of the kids have been spending too much time on their devices. We have applied a policy of 2 hours combined on devices for entertainment. Devices can be used for learning something but need to be approved by the parents. We will revisit this every week.

Problem Solving

I wanted to spend some weeks focusing on problem-solving. I found 2 problems.

Juniors

How many revolutions of the car tyre it would take to cover a distance of 2km?

Grade 7+

We have a 3 digit number, when we subtract the sum of its digits from the 3 digit number, we end up with the square of the sum of digits. What is the 3 digit number?

Both groups struggled with the problems and needed a lot of guidance. We will continue to explore these problems next week as well.

Blogging Topic

The topic for next week is .. My life as a tiger.

Learning Project

Zubair is teaching 3 kids how to make paper planes. Zoha will teach 2 kids some basic gymnastic moves.

I provided simple knitting kits I found at BigW to Anaya, Alamgir and Mahnoor. They will be learning and teaching the other kids later.