Messy

Today we had an experimental playdate. Basically, our good friends invited us over to make some big messes at their house in the name of science. We used this book to guide us:


We found that the instructions were clear to follow, with very age-appropriate activities and descriptions.

Our first order of business was to get some homemade mint chocolate chip ice cream going in the ice cream maker. The kids clamored to take turns adding ingredients and loved watching the concoction spin around on the counter. This was sort of a side project to the main event, but food science is a fascinating discipline that should never be overlooked! Following a protocol, making discreet measurements, and often, applying temperature change to cause phase transition--baking is such a relevant way to subtly introduce good scientific practices to kids!

Anyway, for our main projects, we really played to our target audience and decided to make slime and snot.

Slime:


This didn't turn out quite how we adults were envisioning, but it was definitely cool. Cornstarch was the main ingredient here, which made the mixture solid in the bowl, but slimy when you tried to pick it up.

Next up, snot:

OK, this had more the consistency we were expecting for slime. But it was also stretchy, and well, snot-like, I guess. This one was made with unflavored gelatin, which gave it a bit of an unpleasant odor, but was definitely fun to play with.

Also fun? Mixing our polymers into one big slimy mess!



The book gave a very nice blurb about how polymers were made and why our slime and snot had the unique physical properties that they did. I'm not sure the kids were really too interested in that, though. Not when they were being actively encouraged to get messy!

We had been hoping to make a soda bottle geyser to cap off our morning of mess, but we had to put that off for another day. Before our playdate ended, we were all able to have a nice bowl of our homemade ice cream. The kids were pretty excited to not only have dessert before lunch, but to know that they all played a part in making our treat. Thank you to our friends for a fun morning...and sorry about the state of your kitchen after our little get together.

Sing A Song Of Science

Oh, hello! That's right, I have this blog over here to chat about cool science-y things. I haven't forgotten about this space, I promise; we've just been busy with other things and have not had much time to do any extra projects recently. But as we start the countdown to summer vacation, I am definitely gearing up for some science activities with the kids.

In the meantime, may I recommend a few songs about science?

We've been having a blast listening to and watching Here Comes Science, the latest children's release by They Might Be Giants. Some of the songs are just silly fun, but some of them are truly educational. For example, my four year old now can name the planets in order thanks to repeated playings of How Many Planets. Fun for the whole family!

For the grown-ups, here are a few entertaining offerings.

PCR song I
PCR song II (GTCA)
These are actually advertisements for the company Bio Rad, but they are extremely clever (and catchy!)

A Biologist's Mother's Day Song. (Thanks to my brother for sending this my way! He passed it on in a timely fashion; I am just slow in getting it posted here.)

And finally, a classic (in my family, at least): The Elements, by Tom Lehrer. Good stuff, that.

Anyone else have some scientific tunes that they'd like to share? We're all ears, harhar. Happy listening, and check back soon to see what we've got cooking here (literally!)--should be fun!

Disappointing Results

Last week, we had some flowers hanging around from Valentine's Day and my preschooler was very interested in how they "drank" their water. In order to demonstrate transpiration, I placed some white flowers in glasses of colored water. Since this was a spur-of-the-moment activity, we used the only white flowers we had on hand--baby's breath. Note: if you try this at home, use something else!

We started full of ambition and excitement, adding a few drops of food coloring to several glasses. I had big plans for further investigation once we established our baselines (varying temperature, adding sugar to the water, etc).


Unfortunately, our results were far from spectacular. This was very disappointing to the curious four year old who checked on the flowers every few minutes. We did get it work a little bit with the green dye, thus demonstrating that the flowers were pulling water up through their stems and out to the petals.

Elapsed time: 48 hours

For the blue and red dye, we discovered several small bends and breaks in the stems that we hadn't noticed when we first put the baby's breath in water. We might redo the experiment with a heartier flower (white carnations) or even some veggies (celery or carrots).