Hands-On Activities

I absolutely love all hands-on teaching methods, and this is one of my favorites from the last two weeks. My 5^th grader is learning about some of the most important advancements made in the world of transportation. I am blown away by all the educational materials available to my children. We can jump online or head over to the library and find an insane amount of supplemental materials for each topic. I had no idea the Wright brothers ran a bicycle shop full-time and made planes in the winter when the shop was slow. This is just one of the fun facts we learned while researching some of the amazing inventions and inventors from America’s past.

My son was particularly interested in Henry Ford and his amazing Model T. We talked all about the advancements made in production, and why this car made such a huge impact on the world of motor vehicles. The Model T was the first affordable car for the general population, and it was the beginning of a total shift in how we would mass produce the enormous number of items used by today’s consumer. There is clearly a down side to the mass market mentality, but we tried to focus on the upside of this new production method.

In order to show my kids just how much of an impact an assembly line can have on production, I challenged each of my three kids to produce as many candy cars as they could in just one minute. Each of the kids did their best to run around the kitchen and grab all the items they needed to create one car at a time. The outcome was one sloppy car from only one child. The other two were not able to create one single finished product in 60 seconds. Then each child chose their jobs, and we created an assembly line to produce the tiny candy cars. The kids were able to pump out three completed cars and one half finished product in just 60 seconds. It was a real learning moment for each of them. The amount of time and energy needed to complete this challenge diminished significantly when they implemented the “assembly line” mentality. I’m sure they could have pounded out a few more if we would have had access to a moving assembly line, but that was not to be… I hope they never forget Henry Ford and his moving assembly line.