Growing Everyday

Jared is very into the sink and float experiments. I think he just likes to put things in the water. Still, he asks to do experiments of this kind all the time. So I decided we would try different fruit in the aquarium to see whihc sank and whick floated. We used an apple, tangelo, lime, lemon, carrots, and grapes. First the children had to fill out a sheet predicting which items would sink of float.

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Next, we placed, aka dropped, the food in the water and marked down whether it sank or floated.

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Lastly, we peeled the tangelo, lemon, and lime to see if being peeled made a difference.

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Okay so for Beka and Jared that wasn’t the last step. The last step was to mutilate all the food into unrecognizable shapes, add salt to make the "witches’ brew or stew", and then taste it. I don’t know why all my science experiments disintegrate into making a mess, but at least the kids learned something for awhile.

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I read about this cool science experiment on a messageboard I belong to. You build up static electricity on a balloon and the bubbles will be attracted to the balloon. It was simply amazing. Beka and Jared could get the bubbles to land on their balloons. If the bubbles landed on the ground, you could get them to "jump" onto the ballon.

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Of course, the activity, eventually, disintegrated into stomping bubbles.
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On a TV show Beka and Jared saw the characters catching snowflakes on pieces of paper. The next time it snowed we decided to try it. It is not as easy as the show made it out to be and we need a better magnifying glass to really see how each snowflake is unique. But we had fun trying and then playing in the snow

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We have done this experiment before but Jared really likes it and is intrigue by it. You take a container of milk and add food coloring around the edges. The food coloring will not move or mix due to the surface tension of the milk, but whne you add a drop of soap to the middle that all changes. The food coloring mixes and swirls together. Interesting patterns emerge. It is cool even as an adult to watch.

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My kids have always been explorers. They love learning about the world around them and how things work. I am consistently looking up information in order to answer these questions. I don’t know how many times I have been over the water cycle with Beka because she continues to wonder where rain comes from and now (because of a commercial) she wants to understand low and high pressure systems. Anyway, some things are best learned by exploring them yourself. So when the kids were asking about eggs and baby chicks, we got out some eggs and looked at them and discussed them.

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The project went a little off track when they decided we need to add food coloring.

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There are times, when Beka is at school that Jared gets unbelievably bored. And he is such an outside child, that is winter is killing him. Just today, he asked if he could wear short sleeves because he wanted to pretend it was spring.

"Mommy, it makes me happy to see the snow melt."

"Why is that, Jared?"

"It means spring is coming."

So in order to relieve this boredom, I am trying to come up with activities for him. We might practice writing his name, play tag in the house, or his favorite do a science experiment. Now this can get messy, but he really loves it. The experiment we did most recently was sink and float. Jared collects things from all over the house to do his experiment with. Sometimes, he will even see how many things he can stack before the whole pile sinks.

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