Teacher Notes

Like I said, I didn’t pick it out, but it just came with our curriculum.  (I need to correct myself.  It’s part of the MFW supplements, so I guess I did just add it on.)  It comes with a booklet with blueprints for a bit over 100 electrical “inventions” the kids call them.  Each project teaches them one more fact about electricity and how it works.  The pieces have metal snaps on them, similar to what you’d find on a jacket, and they just snap together on this plastic board.

Both Silje and David devoured it.  They sped through 50 projects in the first day.  I was pretty sure this was going to be exciting, and then deflate once they were done with it.  Silje absolutely loves it, but David is a bit obsessive about it, and she doesn’t like playing it with him because he’s a bit intense with it.  She’ll play it by herself when he’s outside though.

Both the kids have gone from the basic blueprints provided to creating their own experiments, and figuring out why their experiment does or doesn’t work.  They’re starting to come back together to play to have a quick conference on why an experiment may not be working.  They know I’m no help, so they’ve started getting some library books on electricity to problem solve.

I had to tell them at the beginning I would be no help.  I had to confess to them that I knew very little to nothing about electrical things.  Both of them dropped their jaws as I made this confession.  It was so easy.  How could I not know?  They’re building radios and fans and setting off musical speakers, and sending the fan flying in the air, and turning on and off lights, and running these things separately and then simultaneously, all on this little board, using these little pieces.

I looked on Amazon, and saw that the set that My Father’s World sent us is actually one of the smallest Snap Circuit sets.  It’s the SC-100.  Snap Circuit makes much larger sets, along with what seems to be the most common to get: the Snap Circuits SC-300.  You can do over 300 projects with that box.  Fortunately, they have an Upgrade Kit set that upgrades your current SC-100 to a SC-300 by just adding the pieces you are missing.  I may have just figured out what David will be getting for his birthday this Fall.

They also have green energy kits where the kids make inventions with solar and wind power, and kits that have robotics…

this is a crazy road to go down.  I honestly don’t know much about it, but I know my kids are crazy about it, and they’re doing electrical experiments for fun in their spare time.  To me, that’s extremely exciting.