This past month we have been learning/teaching about electricity. We started with the non-electricity day and followed with the documentary of landsvirkjun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZsA5ZZighY a shorter english version you can see on http://www.landsvirkjun.com/. The documentary shows how Iceland's National Power Company produces electricity from renewable resources in geothermal and hydropowerplants and experiments with wind power. Students made a resume of information in a Power Point show.Energy%20on%20Iceland%20pdf.pdf A pair of students made one or two slides and the younger ones made drawings to add.

To understand a bit more about electricity we watched the movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHFkaeDZJWs and made a steadyness game from a shoe box, battery, lightbulb and some wire which uses the info that electricity needs a full circuit to light a bulb. Of course it is the challenge not to light the bulb. These boxes led to the question, what is electricity? how is it generated? This we tried to understand with experimenting with balloons and finding out about static shock, static cling and static repulsion. The clips from the children's museum of Houston were very helpful in this lesson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqRpZOwqMBU and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCh3KEl-eYY and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEteWJ2MjRk.

To make the link between static electricity and flowing electricity from a generator we took apart a little light with generator on manual power, watched http://fraedsla.or.is/Raforka/and did a game holding and squeezing hands sitting in a circle and making a current like an electric circuit, sometimes going in the opposite direction if one squeezes twice. The site of the university of manchester shows how a generator works in a very simple way. see: http://www.childrensuniversity.manchester.ac.uk/interactives/science/energy/electricity/ In the end we built in a switch in our steadiness games and decorated the boxes a bit more. 

In iceland there is plenty of renewable energy. The question for the future is how much from the unspoiled nature of Iceland we would like to sacrifice for making electricity and heating. To make our students aware of choices we added some drawings of powerlines and powerstations to pictures of natural areas which are maybe used to generate electricity.