Articles in Home | Home and Family | Parenting

Teaching Kids About Electricity

By: Donny Tee , Posted On: Friday, March 30, 2007

Electricity is obviously important in our lives, but it can be dangerous if misunderstood. This is particularly true for children. Fortunately, there are simple, inexpensive projects that can show them both the benefits and risks.

It is a good idea to teach children about electricity for several reasons. Electricity and magnetism are such basic principles of science that an understanding of them gives a good background in several scientific disciplines such as chemistry and physics. Also, electricity can be dangerous and learning respect for it is very much a part of any project that is geared toward children. The most important reason is that electricity is just plain fun to play around with and children seem to be endlessly fascinated by it.

For a small amount of money and a trip to Radio Shack, you can build a simple electrical generator that will produce enough current to light a small light bulb. This project is ideal for a science fair project. You need 4 1cm x 2cm x 5cm ceramic magnets (Radio Shack part # 64-1877), 200 feet of #30 magnet wire (Radio Shack part #278-1345), and a 1.5v 25mA light bulb (Radio Shack part #273-1139). All of these would cost less than $10. The only other things needed are cardboard to make a box and a large iron nail. A hand drill is a helpful optional item. The nail is inserted through the box and the magnets are attached to the nail. The box is wrapped with the wire making a coil. When the magnets and nail are spun rapidly (this is where the hand drill comes in handy), enough current can be generated to light the bulb.

A good paperback book written by Rudolf F. Graf is Safe and Simple Electrical Experiments. It contains over 101 projects and experiments dealing with static electricity, magnetism, current electricity, and electromagnetism. This book costs less than $8 and most of the projects have budgets less than the simple generator in the previous paragraph.

There are more complex toys available if you wish to make a more serious investment. The Elenco Company makes the Electronic Snap Circuits SC-300 kit and the Electronic Playground 50-in-one kit. The SC-300 has snap together parts that are like giant legos. It is possible to complete up to 300 projects including a radio, a doorbell, and a burglar alarm. In the end, it does not matter which approach you take. You can spend a little bit of money or utilize projects that can be done for almost no cost. The idea is that electrical projects are fun. They teach quite a bit about an important and practical area of science. They also give children an early understanding and respect for this useful, but dangerous force. These are all pretty compelling reasons for giving them a try.

Article Source: http://www.many-articles.com

 Loading ...

Syndicate Parenting Related Articles Via RSS!  

Boost your websites' ranking in the search engines, and attract more repeat visitors to your websites with automatic and continually updating content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS). To syndicate the above article "Teaching Kids About Electricity" and other "Parenting" related articles at your websites and/or blogs, simply click on the XML Icon above to grab the RSS feed -- It's FREE!

Category: Home | Home and Family | Parenting