Educating Risa

I came across this site about the periodic table of the elements, and was quite taken with Worksheet 3, as that kind of puzzle quite engages Daegan. So I thought we’d do a little bit on the periodic table of the elements this morning, before tackling the chemistry/geography puzzle worksheet.

We started by watching a couple fun videos on the elements: They Might Be Giants’ “Meet the Elements” and Tom Lehrer’s classic “Elements Song.”  There a multiple versions of both on youtube; the two we liked best were these:

 

 

Another great source of videos—one for each element—can be found here. We didn’t watch any as Daegan wanted to get on to the puzzle sheet. We talked very briefly about how the periodic table is arranged (by atomic number, or number of protons in the nucleus—for a basic overview, I relied on wikipedia), and then made sure our printed periodic table was at hand.

Daegan got down to work on on the place name puzzles. Unfortunately, we found a couple typos:

On the sheet, 75 should be 57 (in answers Poland, Netherlands, and Finland) and 16 should be 99 (at the end of Wales). I added a trick question at the bottom.

After Daegan had done a few of the puzzles, the activity was extended in a most natural way. “Mom, I know Spain and Poland are in Europe. But where’s Athens?” So off we went to the hallway, where we have kid-level maps hanging:

We found Athens on the map, noting that it was the capital of Greece. For all the other answers, which were all countries, I had Daegan go find the country on a map, and come back and tell me the capital of that country (which are on our map, so that way I knew he had located the country). He quite enjoyed this (kinesthetic learning!), particularly learning how to correctly pronounce Buenos Aires (capital of Argentina), as well as its meaning (‘good air”). The only difficulty we encountered was not having Wales on the map separate from the United Kingdom as a whole.

While Daegan worked on his puzzles and consulted the maps, I played around making a few more puzzles of simple words. We’re going to try these another day:

20  7  66 (a sweet treat)

16  8  6  6  68 (fun to play in summer)

15  18  53  16 (Capital of France)

5  8  39  16 (what you and Gareth are)

6  8  86 (delicious popped, or on the cob)

6  13  31 R-Y (where we live—note: you may find you have to add some letters to get your city to work)

94  6  19 (you need this to play hockey)

56  90 (you might take one before bed)

Have fun playing around with this idea; it’s very flexible. To incorporate math, for example, you could give simple math problems (8+8) or more challenging ones (4 squared), or math riddles (how old you will be in 9 years), instead of simply giving the number (16). And if you come up with more riddle words of elements, particularly place names, please share. Thanks!