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Showing posts with label Colonial America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Colonial America. Show all posts
Spinning with a Drop Spindle
Ben Franklin, Sound and Mapping Ocean Currents
Previous posts: Young Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin and Electricity)
1762 Mapped Postal Routes in the colonies. Invented Glass Armonica
Have you ever made sounds with a glass and some water? Moisten a finger with water and rub it evenly around the top of a glass to make a ringing sound.
Ben Franklin designed a version of this called the glass armonica. This instrument had a row of glass bowls mounted on a long axle attached to a wheel. The lower half of the bowls rested in water. The player used the fingers of both hands to rub the wet glasses as they turned.
Wavelength and Sound
The wavelength of sound waves has a dramatic effect on how we hear the sound. This demonstration shows the effect.
Take a glass or plastic bottle. Glass is best and larger bottles are better. Hold the bottle up to your mouth so that the top edge of the bottle opening just touches your bottom lip. Pursing your lips, blow across the top of the bottle. It takes a little practice, but you should be able to produce a deep, low sound like a horn.
Now fill the bottle 3/4 the way full of water and blow across the opening as before. How is the sound different? The sound should be much higher now.
Wavelength is the distance between the top or crest of a wave to the crest of the next wave (or the distance between the bottom or troughs.)The wavelength of the sound wave produced was determined by how far the air could travel up and down the bottle. When the bottle was empty, air could travel all the way to the bottom of the bottle, producing sound waves with a long wavelength. When the bottle had lots of water in it, there wasn't much distance over which air could travel. As a result, the waves produced had a small wavelength.
Sound waves with large wavelengths have small frequencies and low pitches whereas sound waves with small wavelengths have large frequencies and high pitches.
The Amplitude of a Sound Wave
Make a simple stringed instrument by stretching rubber bands around a cardboard box with a hole cut in the center of one side. You could also use a plastic tub.
Watch the strings and listen to the sound as you pluck them. First pluck lightly, and then harder. Did you notice that the harder you pluck the stings, the more they vibrate and the louder the sound?
The model of the ear from The Body Book by Donald Silver, is almost 3-D, and yet it still folds up flat to place in a folder. The first layer shows the outer ear. The second layer shows that the ear drum is at the end of the ear canal. The hammer, anvil and stirrup bones are next, attaching at the other end to to an opening in the cochlea. You can easily visually trace sound vibrations as they pass through the parts of the ear and to the auditory nerves which send the signals to the brain with this model.
More about sound...What Things Affect Sound?
Make Your Own Violin (craft tutorial)
The Medium Through Which Sound Waves Travel
Ben Franklin and Mapping Ocean Currents
Ben Franklin observed that mail sent by ship from America to England arrived two weeks sooner than the mail sent by ship from England to America. He began to form theories as to why this was. Perhaps the English sailors were not as good, or maybe the American ships were better built. He and a Nantucket sea captain, Timothy Folger determined that a strong current in the Atlantic Ocean helped speed American ships eastward toward England, but the same current slowed down the westward trip. Franklin drew maps of the ocean current and called it the Gulf Stream. He told the mail carrying ships how to take advantage of the Gulf Stream currents on their trips to England and how to avoid this current on their trips to America.
More about Ocean Currents.
1762 Mapped Postal Routes in the colonies. Invented Glass Armonica
Have you ever made sounds with a glass and some water? Moisten a finger with water and rub it evenly around the top of a glass to make a ringing sound.
Ben Franklin designed a version of this called the glass armonica. This instrument had a row of glass bowls mounted on a long axle attached to a wheel. The lower half of the bowls rested in water. The player used the fingers of both hands to rub the wet glasses as they turned. Wavelength and Sound
The wavelength of sound waves has a dramatic effect on how we hear the sound. This demonstration shows the effect.
Take a glass or plastic bottle. Glass is best and larger bottles are better. Hold the bottle up to your mouth so that the top edge of the bottle opening just touches your bottom lip. Pursing your lips, blow across the top of the bottle. It takes a little practice, but you should be able to produce a deep, low sound like a horn.
The Amplitude of a Sound Wave
Watch the strings and listen to the sound as you pluck them. First pluck lightly, and then harder. Did you notice that the harder you pluck the stings, the more they vibrate and the louder the sound?
The Ear
The model of the ear from The Body Book by Donald Silver, is almost 3-D, and yet it still folds up flat to place in a folder. The first layer shows the outer ear. The second layer shows that the ear drum is at the end of the ear canal. The hammer, anvil and stirrup bones are next, attaching at the other end to to an opening in the cochlea. You can easily visually trace sound vibrations as they pass through the parts of the ear and to the auditory nerves which send the signals to the brain with this model.
More about sound...What Things Affect Sound?
Make Your Own Violin (craft tutorial)
The Medium Through Which Sound Waves Travel
Ben Franklin and Mapping Ocean Currents
Ben Franklin observed that mail sent by ship from America to England arrived two weeks sooner than the mail sent by ship from England to America. He began to form theories as to why this was. Perhaps the English sailors were not as good, or maybe the American ships were better built. He and a Nantucket sea captain, Timothy Folger determined that a strong current in the Atlantic Ocean helped speed American ships eastward toward England, but the same current slowed down the westward trip. Franklin drew maps of the ocean current and called it the Gulf Stream. He told the mail carrying ships how to take advantage of the Gulf Stream currents on their trips to England and how to avoid this current on their trips to America.
Ben Franklin and Electricity
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(Previous post about Young Ben Franklin)
1746 Began his First Experiments with Electricity
1747-1748 Retired from active Business to Continue Electrical Experiments and Pursue Public Service
1749 Helped Found the Pennsylvania Academy (which later became the University of Pennsylvania)
1750-1764 Served on the Pennsylvania Assembly and helped found the Pennsylvania Hospital, America's first charity hospital. Established the First Fire Insurance Company in North America. Appointed Deputy Postmaster General of North America. Wrote a plan for a union of the colonies for security and defense.
1752-1754 Conducted Famous Kite Experiment. Erected Lightning Rods in Philadelphia. Received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London for Research in electricity.
Everyone is familiar with Franklin's kite flying electricity experiment in which he proved that lightning and electricity are the same thing. Franklin's discoveries about electricity went far beyond lightning, however. At the time Franklin was conducting his experiments, people believed that there were two kinds of electricity, one kind that attracted objects and another kind that pushed objects away. Franklin was able to prove that they were the same force and this understanding later led to the invention of the battery, the electric motor and alternating electric current. He didn't know, however, the causes of electricity because it was not understood at this time on the atomic level. Even detecting electricity can be difficult, since you can't see or hear it, but you sometimes can see the effects of it. Most of Franklin's experiments were on static electricity, so let's see what we can learn about electricity by looking at static electricity.
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1746 Began his First Experiments with Electricity
1747-1748 Retired from active Business to Continue Electrical Experiments and Pursue Public Service
1749 Helped Found the Pennsylvania Academy (which later became the University of Pennsylvania)
1750-1764 Served on the Pennsylvania Assembly and helped found the Pennsylvania Hospital, America's first charity hospital. Established the First Fire Insurance Company in North America. Appointed Deputy Postmaster General of North America. Wrote a plan for a union of the colonies for security and defense.
1752-1754 Conducted Famous Kite Experiment. Erected Lightning Rods in Philadelphia. Received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London for Research in electricity.
Everyone is familiar with Franklin's kite flying electricity experiment in which he proved that lightning and electricity are the same thing. Franklin's discoveries about electricity went far beyond lightning, however. At the time Franklin was conducting his experiments, people believed that there were two kinds of electricity, one kind that attracted objects and another kind that pushed objects away. Franklin was able to prove that they were the same force and this understanding later led to the invention of the battery, the electric motor and alternating electric current. He didn't know, however, the causes of electricity because it was not understood at this time on the atomic level. Even detecting electricity can be difficult, since you can't see or hear it, but you sometimes can see the effects of it. Most of Franklin's experiments were on static electricity, so let's see what we can learn about electricity by looking at static electricity.
You will need two balloons for this demonstration. Tie some thread onto one of the balloons and attach the other end of the thread to the ceiling with some tape, so that the balloon hangs from the thread. You want it to hang about chest level. Rub the balloon that is hanging in your hair, so that it picks up some electrical charge. Take the other balloon and rub it in your hair also.
Now hold the second balloon in both of your hands and slowly bring it close to the balloon that is hanging. When the balloons are rubbed in hair, they pick up some stray electrons from the hair, causing the balloons to pick up a negative charge. When brought close to each other, they will repel because like charges repel one another.
Now, take a piece of clear tape and tape it to the top of a table, leaving a little part loose so it can be removed quickly. Quickly rip the tape off the table and holding it at both ends, hold it near the balloon with the sticky side facing the balloon. When ripping the tape off, the tape loses negative charges because the tape leaves electrons behind in the sticky residue left on the table, making it become positively charged. When held up to the balloon, which is negatively charged from rubbing it in hair, it is attracted to the positively charged tape, because opposite charges attract one another.
There are two ways that atoms gain or lose electrons. To see the different ways, we made an electroscope. To make one, you will need a glass, a plastic lid that is bigger than the mouth of the glass, a paper clip or non-coated wire, two small thin strips of aluminum foil and a balloon.
Take the wire or paper clip and twist it into a shape with a circle at the top and two hooks underneath. Cut a slot in the plastic lid and slide the end of the wire with the hooks on it through the slot and turn it 90 degrees so that the circle holds the wire in place. Hang the two strips of foil on the hooks. Place the lid on top of the glass, so that the foil strips hang inside the glass.
Rub the balloon in your hair as before, to give it a negative charge. Bring the balloon close to the wire. It might look like the balloon is touching the wire in this picture, but it isn't really. You should just get the balloon close to the wire, not touching it. The foil strips should move away from each other because the negative charge of the balloon will repel the negatively charged electrons in the wire and foil strips. Since they are repelled, they travel away from the balloon, causing the foil strips to be rich with electrons, which causes the foil strips to repel one another.
If you move the balloon away, the foil strips should relax again. Once the negatively charged balloon is moved away, the electrons in the foil strips are able to travel back up into their normal position, and the positive charges in the paper clip travel back to their normal position, making everything neutral again.
If you repeat the experiment but this time let the balloon touch the wire, the foil strips should begin to stay pulled apart, even after you remove the balloon. By touching the balloon to the wire, some of the balloons extra electrons were able to travel into the paper clip and flow into the foil strips, causing a permanent negative charge.Since the foil strips stayed negatively charged, the stayed away from each other. This is called charging by conduction.
Next, bring the balloon close to the wire, and touch the wire with the finger from your other hand. The foil strips should relax. Then, at the same moment, pull both the balloon and your finger away. The foil strips should move away from each other again. Like in the previous experiment, when the balloon was moved near the wire, the electrons in the wire and foil moved, concentrating the negative charges into the foil, causing them to repel each other, however when you touched your finger to the wire, the electrons could travel farther away from the balloon by traveling through your finger up your arm. The electrons then moved from the wire and foil strips and when you moved both the balloon and your finger away at the same time, the wire and foil were left with fewer electrons than they should have, giving the foils an overall positive charge, moving them away from each other. When charging so that the resulting charge is opposite of the charge you used, it is called charging by induction.
Young Ben Franklin
1718 Ben Franklin, age 12, is apprenticed to his brother, James, a Boston printer.
1723 Franklin ran away to Philadelphia, where he found work at Samuel Keimer's printing house.
1728-1731 Franklin formed the first printing partnership. Published first edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette.
1732 Franklin published the first edition of Poor Richard's Almanack.
For our study of this part of Franklin's life, we decided to make our own paper. Franklin did not make his own paper, (although he did have investments in paper mills) but Franklin's writing and publishing contributed to the American Revoluton. In Franklin's day papermaking was a difficult, time-consuming and expensive process. Paper was made from rags instead of wood and fabric in the colonies was scarce. Therefore, initially most of the paper used in the American colonies came from England, which meant that England could also control what and how much was published in the colonies. Once paper mills were constructed in Pennsylvania, Americans began to publish their ideas more widely and more frequently.
The ability to do this affected the progress of the American Revolution.
The ability to do this affected the progress of the American Revolution.
Since the colonies used cloth in their paper, we did a variation on our previous paper-making and used dried lint instead of paper as our base. Yes, lint. The kind you get from the drier. Don't be alarmed if you find hair in your dryer lint, especially if you have pets. Just blend it up and don't think about it.
We found this material harder to work with, and if you want to do this for a craft, I would suggest adding half lint and half either paper fiber or dried plant material, such as dried flowers to give it more stability.
I knew it was going to come out an ugly gray color, so I tried bleaching it white with a little bleach, but it did not work. Some tempra paint or paste food color might color it.
It really made them appreciate how hard it was to get the printed material out to the public in Colonial America.
And, if you haven't already made a printing press, you could make one and use your new paper!
More about Ben Franklin: Ben Franklin and Electricity
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| Paper made from dryer lint, while still wet. |
It really made them appreciate how hard it was to get the printed material out to the public in Colonial America.
More about Ben Franklin: Ben Franklin and Electricity
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| Link up your History and Geography Posts! |
Daily Life in the Colonies
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| Alex's worksheet on the reasons for settlers coming to the different colonies. |
The colonists that settled in the New World came for many reasons, and their reasons helped to flavor the different areas.
The Northern Colonies
The Northern Colonies
Colonial Hornbook
The Northern colonies were prodominately settled by the Puritans. Reading was very important to the Puritans becuse they needed to be able to read the Bible. Children learned to read from a Primer, a early schoolbook. A horn book was also used for lessons because paper for books and writing was scarce.
The Northern colonies were prodominately settled by the Puritans. Reading was very important to the Puritans becuse they needed to be able to read the Bible. Children learned to read from a Primer, a early schoolbook. A horn book was also used for lessons because paper for books and writing was scarce.
The Middle Colonies
Dutch Blitz Game
The Middle Colonies became known as "the bread colonies" because they farmed grains and milled flour for bread. The flour was then sold to all the colonies.
Wye Grist Mill Field Trip
Pennsylvania Dutch Tin Designs
Pennsylvania Dutch Stencil DesignsWye Grist Mill Field Trip
Southern Colonies
The Southern Colonies included farmers trying to get rich through trade, Africans brought to the New World as slaves and those enticed to come through gifts of land or promises of freedom.
More Colonial Activites from Homeschool in the Woods at Aussie Pumpkin Patch.
North Eastern Indian Toys and Games: Cornhusk Dolls
Making corn husk dolls has been on my list of things to do with the boys for a long time. I had made them with Katie when she was little, but I hadn't made them with the boys yet.
Many Indians made them to resemble their own tribes. The Iroquois and the Seneca have legends centered around the corn husk doll.
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| Gather a half-dozen or so corn husks. Some make them while they are still green. They are easy to bend then, but they have a tendency to mold as they dry out. If you use fully dry husks, they are difficult to bend. Some people soak them in water about an hour before making the dolls. We dried our husks out a few days and they were partially dry but were still limber enough to bend. |
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| Arrange your husks so the thinner ends are at the top. Tie your husk ends together a couple of inches down from the top. We used string. You could also use raffia, some thin strips of the husk, some leather thong or yarn. Trim off the ends so that it is even at the top. Take half of the corn husks and fold them over where you have tied to cover the string and make a nice surface for the face. Tie a piece of string at the throat. |
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| Now take a couple thin pieces of corn husk and roll them to form the arms. Tie at both ends and trim neatly at both ends. Lift half of the bottom of the body corn husks and slip the arms up in place. |
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| Tie a string at the waist under the arms. |
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| If you are making a girl, all you have to do is trim the bottom to make her skirt even. If you are making a boy, divide the bottom husks into the two legs by cutting them in the center. Part them and tie at the ends to form legs. Trim the bottoms of the legs evenly. |
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| We found the easiest way to make hair was to hot glue gun some corn silk on the head. This of course is not as authentic as tying it on or the like, but is the easiest. |
Other tutorials on how to make a corn husk doll can be found here: (If you have one, leave your link in the comments.) Everyone seems to make them a little differently.
North Eastern Indian Toys and Games: Tiny Indian Doll Pouch
Remember our little Indian girl? She is sporting the wampum belt we made for her, and now she has a tiny beaded pouch as well.
This is a good beginning sewing project because it doesn't take long to make.
Cut a piece of felt about two and a half times the length of the pouch you want to make.
Fold the bottom up about two-fifths of the way up. Sew the edges together with a simple stitch with embroidery thread or thin string. If they have trouble getting a embroidery need through two thicknesses of felt, you can punch some guide hole in it with a nail and hammer, much like we did with our felt treasure pouches.
You can thread some beads on as you go for decoration.
For this pouch, Quentin sewed two beads on the front as well. Leave a length of embroidery thread for the pouch's strap.
The rest of the felt can be folded over as a flap for the pouch. You can punch a whole in the flap large enough for the beads to fit through as a latch for the pouch.
All finished and ready to hold some tiny treasures a little Indian might like, such as acorns.
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