A Cultured Science Experiment: Grow Your Own Bacteria

My parents bought the kids an awesome microscope for Christmas and they lucked out by getting a superb demonstration from both of their scientist grandparents last weekend. As we were reading through the accompanying book and talking about viewing different organisms, I remembered that the kids and I spent an afternoon last year culturing bacteria and I completely forgot to share the experiment!

Weekend Makes

I can proudly say that I held off on buying Halloween candy until just a few days ago and it's been deeply hidden away, waiting to see the light of day until tomorrow. But, between our recent move to a more residential neighborhood and the kids finally being old enough, I think we're set up for some serious trick or treating this year. Which means that I also need a plan to deal with all the candy that is going to flood in after I hand out our stash (other than me eating all of it). Thus, candy Weekend Makes. Happy Halloweening!!

1 / love this idea breaking down Wayne Thiebaud compositions -- maybe a little advanced, but I think we could try it.

2 / use a small candy box to make an instant comfort box like this! I know one little lady that would love to have something like that at school.

3 / you'll have to adjust based on your candy haul, but I love the idea of this edible cell for a good science lesson.

4 / paint with Skittles!

5 / a good science experiment for the younger set -- will the candy sink or float!?

Spooky Oobleck!

My guys have been chomping at the bit to make a fall sensory project (see our favorites round up here) and I thought it would be fun to loop in a little science at the same time (it's on our Fall Bucket List after all!). So we decided to make a batch of spooky oobleck!

Spooky Science: DIY Fake Blood

Can you believe Halloween is almost here?! My kiddos are so excited that they've been asking for spooky activity upon spooky activity this week. You might recall that our entire family dressed up as vampires last year for the holiday and Kane was insistent on having realistic full make-up, including a constant reapplication of fake blood dripping from his fangs. It tasted disgusting, but he really wanted to go for the full effect. So I thought it would be fun to use one of his afternoons off this week (parent-teacher conferences!) to try our hand at a little gross and spooky science: DIY fake blood.

Miscellaneous Madness: Cloud Viewing and Classification (and a freebie)

Among the 50+ items on our Summer Bucket List is the activity "finding shapes in clouds." Seems simple enough, right? So obviously mom had to make it more complicated and turn it into a science lesson. First, she decided to make our very own cloud viewers. She'd seen a few floating around the web and designed up a handheld viewing window that includes photos of all the basic cloud shapes. With a chopstick handle, of course.

Once those were ready, Cam and mom hit up the library to check out a few books about clouds, including "Clouds," by Maryellen Gregoire (the simplest and a good one to start with); "Clouds," by Trudi Strain Trueit (the best of the batch -- for kids, but included enough detail to really cover all cloud types); and "the kids' book of Clouds & Sky," by Frank Staub (more detailed and probably for a slightly older age group of kids, but interesting nonetheless).

We packed up our viewers, a picnic and our books and headed over to our local Meridian Hill Park for some cloud viewing. It was hotter than H outside, but we still scored a spot in the shade with a good window through the tree branches for spotting clouds. There was really only one type of cloud gracing the sky that day: big puffy marshmallow cumulus clouds. So we ditched the viewers and took to finding shapes: dragons, butterflies, turtles, etc.

When the local squirrels started to form a posse for our pistachios, we decided it was time to pack up and check out the park's waterfalls. Mistake. Out of the shade it was about 110 degrees (seriously). Turns out cloud viewing is good for a hot day because you aren't moving. We should've stayed put, but didn't dare challenge those city squirrels.

Want to check out some clouds, too? You can make your own cloud viewing window! Mom uploaded our template to google docs (CLICK HERE), so all you have to do is print it on heavy cardstock, cut it out (don't forget to cut out the middle window!), and tape on whatever handle you wish. Mom also put a layer of packing tape over ours to make them a bit sturdier and waterproof. Much like the hidden murals, now that we're in the know, we can't stop looking for and classifying clouds. Come to think of it, we might need an extra travel cloud viewer.

Holidaze: Happy Spring Break, Passover, Easter, etc.

(um, yea, it's snowing on our first day of spring break. but we're going to pretend we're at the beach)

We know, we know. We've been absent. Neglectful really. But, we've been busy. No big wow of a reason. Just having a busy couple of weeks and our scribe (aka mom) had to let something slide. We're going to continue our little hiatus during our spring break this week, but we promise we'll be back with some new goodies soon.

In the meantime, here are some timely activities to keep your little's hands busy:

* Make some Passover playdough (not Kosher)

* Dip a bunch of naturally dyed easter eggs

* Make a tropical sensory tub OR, even better in our opinion, jump in a tropical bath

* Pretend you're actually having a warm spring break and make some popsicles

* Use all those egg cartons for some additional fun. Make egg carton flowers or a quick color scavenger hunt

* Older kiddos not into dying eggs? Save some and do a science experiment

* None of those strike your fancy? Check out our holidaze and artworks pages for a gazillion (no lie) other ideas.

Happy Everything to Everyone!

Weird Science: DIY Lava Lamps

We straight up stole this idea from a buddy of ours who had a rad science birthday party recently. It's simple with supercool results. And a good experiment in density, too. You don't need the light, but we liked to try and make it as close to a real lava lamp as we could (although the lights we used float, so it wasn't exactly the same).

Here's what you'll need:
*a tall bottle (a plastic water bottle works great);
*cooking oil (enough to fill up 3/4 of the bottle);
*water;
*food coloring;
*alka-seltzer tablets; and
*small submersible lights (we used these fairy lights -- you could also hold a flashlight under the bottom of the bottle)

Fill up the bottle 3/4 of the way with cooking oil. Fill the remainder with water, but not quite all the way to the top (you'll need some room for bubbling action). Add a few drops of food coloring (if you use gel food coloring, color the water first -- we made that mistake the first time around). Break up the alka seltzer tablet and drop it in a bit at a time. As the alka seltzer releases small bubbles of carbon dioxide, the bubbles rise up and take some of the colored water with them. If you are using a light, go ahead and add it now.

We waited until the bubbles stopped, put the tops back on (make sure to keep the top off until the bubbles are done or you'll get a nice little explosion), and took them into our cardboard box "tree house" we made that afternoon. With all the lights off, they were great lamps to light the market we were running in there.

OH, you might have noticed we are in the process of coming up with a new topic organization scheme -- our "In Home Entertainment" category is getting a little heavy! We'll get it together ASAP.

In Home Entertainment: Science Experiments in Color

For Christmas, Santa brought Cam and me a Steve Spangler science kit that we've been after, real lab coats and real safety goggles (green and pink, of course). There isn't anything in the kit that you couldn't purchase independently, but Santa was pretty sure that would mean a six-month supply of multiple random ingredients and the kit was the easy way to go.

We recently donned our official lab gear and tried out the first two experiments in the book, which focus on color. To begin, we added fizzing color tablets to test tubes full of water and watched the water bubble and change color. As suggested in the kit, we kept notes of our observations in a super official notebook. For the second experiment, we held up the tubes of color against each other in the light to see what might happen if we mixed two colors together. No one would be surprised to hear that that didn't satisfy our curiosity, we insisted on actually mixing them together to see.

Thanks to our trial run, I knew that the blue and yellow would make green, so I chose those. Cam knew the red and blue would make purple, so she chose those. We were still both thrilled when it actually worked! And we spent lots of time filling and spilling until all our test tubes were brown (mom was pretty happy she had also purchased this messy tray for all our, well, messes). Success in the lab!

In Home Entertainment: Goo

This past weekend mom helped style a science birthday party for a friend's daughter and I got to help out, too. But I had a hard time understanding that I wasn't going to get to go to the party. So mom said we could try out some science experiments at home ourselves. First up was to make some colored goo. Only once mom went to retrieve the recipe from our post ages ago, she discovered our old blog wasn't being hosted by apple anymore and all those posts are gone :( No problem - this is an easy recipe, but so so much fun. So we thought we'd repost it.

All you need is cornstarch, water (about 2 cups per 16 oz. cornstarch) and food coloring (if you want to make it colored). We divided our cornstarch into two small storage containers so we could each have our own batch.  We each mixed in our choice of food coloring into about 1 cup of water.  Then mixed the colored water in with the cornstarch. That's it. You know you have the right consistency when you apply pressure to the mixture and it hardens, but will then turn into liquid when you ease up. You might need to play around with the measurements a bit, but it's all good fun.

We spent some time mixing and then making "ghost tracks" and drawing letters in it with chopsticks. And then I decided, and fortunately Cami agreed, that we could mix our two batches together to make purple (which is the only reason Cam agreed). We had blue and pink hands for a while, but then pretended we were wearing gloves and parlayed that into a game of "scary wedding," for which you had to be wearing gloves, obvi.

This is a good one to keep in mind in the upcoming cold winter months when you're stuck inside!

Eat Starch Mom: Oobleck FAIL

One of my favorite fave books lately has been Dr. Seuss' "Bartholomew and the Oobleck" (500 Hats is a close second).  During one of Cami's naps, we decided to take advantage of the load of liquid starch we had leftover from our tissue paper bottle lights and try out one of the many oobleck recipes we'd seen around (people frequently call the same recipe oobleck, slime, gak, etc.) -- the one we tried was labeled gak, but we thought it looked more ooblecky (and we had already tried out a cornstarch version).

FAIL.

Although this was a different type of FAIL than the last time we tried to use our laundry starch in its' powder phase -- at least that made something cool.  This time absolutely nothing happened.  Despite us continually adding in more glue.  Does anyone do more laundry than mom and actually know if there is a difference between this liquid laundry starch, which appears to be what peeps are using, and the one we are using and mixing up into a liquid?  Well, maybe you don't do MORE laundry, but just do it more correctly?  Mom does a lot of laundry.

And Charlie's Making Me Smile: Ivory Soap Explosion

We are a little young for lots of the cool kids science experiments out there, but this demonstration of Charles' Law seemed too cool to put on the back burner.  Get yourself a bar of ivory soap, cut it in half (we didn't, and a nugget was left in the bottom of our tupperware container), throw it in the microwave, and go.  Ours got HUGE after about 1 minute, so we removed and repeated several times.  Be careful, it actually does get pretty hot.  When it cooled a bit, we decided that it looked like snow and had ourselves a nice little snowball fight on the dining room table.  This was a giant mess.  But we smelled good and mom threw us right in the bathtub pre-soaped.  Our doggie Vegas helped mom clean up the mess and ended up blowing soap bubbles for much of the rest of the afternoon.  Hysterical.