World Meteorological Day

I only found out this morning that today is World Meteorological Day.... A happy coincidence, as I had some free time yesterday while sitting in silence watching a group of A-Level students doing an assessment (I find it really awkward not being able to interact with the students!) to ponder my next writing venture, and decided that a rather cool activity using a ping-pong ball and a bottle of water to make a barometer was a good basis for an article that I should share with the world.
The advertising is not going so well as, besides writing the above, I spent most of the day cleaning the kitchen. Maybe I should write an article, or design an activity day, based on the science behind the properties of common household cleaning products!

The Return From Boston

So, National Science and Engineering Week is over, and my time in Boston is at an end.
After much organising and re-organising, the days seemed to go pretty well, and I think the majority of the kids got something out of their days with me doing cool sciencey stuff relating to gravity and the Solar System. It's a real shame that this week's episode of Wonders of the Universe wasn't available to show the kids the clip with Brian Cox experiencing the gravitational effects that would be found on Neptune and Jupiter!
Further good news from the past week is that my on-line writing career seems to be picking up a bit, with my timely article Explaining Earthquakes to Children having attracted a fair amount of interest (and actually coming up on the first page of the relevant Google search).
The coming week should be a lot quieter, with just the usual bits of part-time teaching to contend with.
One of the down sides of being a part-timer seems to be that I am out of the loop in terms of planning. I seem to be expected to turn up and teach quality lessons without any information about what stage the students have got to. While I am a great believer in 'going with the flow' it doesn't really help in a professional capacity!
Also on the agenda for this week is a concerted effort at getting my advertising materials ready to go for my Freelance science activity days. The mission at hand (should I choose to accept it) is FIND CUSTOMERS!!

National Science and Engineering Week

This is an auspicious time of the year for all of us science geeks..... Yes, once again, the annual frivolity of National Science and Engineering Week is upon us!

For a wandering scientist, this opens up a range of new and exciting possibilities.

For me, it has provided the opportunity to spend 2 days in Boston with 75 small children!

We will be exploring the Solar System from the safety of the school Hall, and investigating Gravity through cool experiments such as this one: science-ing in the pub