We spent a week reading a book about Isaac Newton. Then we got back to doing several experiments a week. Here’s what we did over the last two weeks.

We made an Inertia Zoom Ball. We cut the tops off two 1-liter soda bottles and taped them together. Then we threaded two 12′ long strings through the two-headed bottle. We attached cut up 6-pack rings for handles. With the Zoom Ball at one end, the person at that end spread their hands apart to make the Ball rush to the other end. We took turns letting the Ball zoom back and forth. This demonstrated Newton’s First Law of Motion.

A video:

We made a fan using a K’Nex kit.

We stacked a coin pyramid of a quarter, nickel, penny, and dime on a strip of paper. We positioned the paper to be half hanging off the table. Then we took turns quickly pulling the paper out from under the coins. The paper came out from under the coins and the coin pyramid stayed where it was.

We stacked 20 nickels and tried flicking a quarter at the bottom nickel. The bottom one was supposed to fly out from under the stack, but it didn’t quite work that way. Our nickel stack collapsed instead.

We put an index card on top of an olive jar and placed a nickel on top of that. Then we quickly pulled the index card out so the nickel fell straight down into the jar.

We made a launcher out of a pencil and a rubber band. It made the paper airplane fly pretty far distances.

We made a window that rolls up and down using a K’Nex Gears Kit.

We demonstrated Newton’s Second Law of Motion by rolling a ball into a second ball.

We made a Ping Pong Popper using two toilet paper tubes, paper clips, a rubber band, and plastic wrap. By pulling back and quickly pressing forward with one of the tubes we made a ping ball inside fly out the other end.