Jeni is my inspiration for delving more into science with the kids at an early age. I don't really expect them to grasp fully the concepts, but just enjoying the process and gaining the vocabulary and the gist of the science is a fine start as far as I'm concerned. The six and seven year olds really get it and the younger ones partially get it and are swept up in the fun too, so it's a nice experience for everyone.
We had an afternoon long play date at Jeni's house with some more of their friends from three years old up to seven years old. This post is only going to have some of the things we did with the kids. Not all the things we did, because I think there were something like fifteen projects for them that day! and I don't want to hog the blogspace here with too much older kid stuff. Maybe I will have the gumption to get another blog going for the science related stuff at some point, because we've had dinosaurs/robots/medieval technology and electricity and magnetism since Jeni first invited me to help out. Also, there are some pictures in this post from further experiments we did along the same theme at home a few days later with some more of our friends.
Firstly, here is a floor puzzle I made for the kids to put together, showing all the earth's tectonic plates. It's a printed out image tiled together onto cardboard I pulled from in between the pallets at Costco, edged with electrical tape and cut up with an exacto knife. Yep, there's my cup of tea that I need to get anything done. I have one sat right by me at this moment in fact!
I was amazed that all eleven children worked together on this with mini printed images of how it should fit together. It was more team work than I could have ever hoped for! 
I also found a strange globe for $3.99 in Savers that was completely white with the countries drawn on in black outline. I have no idea what it's intended purpose was, but it was great for me to draw the plates on and label them for the kids to see how the plates from the puzzle fitted together in 3D space. To emphasize this concept, we hard boiled eggs and then let the kids roll them on the table until they cracked showing plates like those on the globe. Some kids managed to squeeze the eggs enough that a crack in the white made some liquid yolk ooze out like magma. 
Another project I put together for them was to test building structures and see what was strongest and most earthquake proof. To do this I built a quick and easy shake table out of a tray, a piece of scrap wood, some nails, some clips and some rubber bands. Here's the diagram showing how it all fitted together to suspend the wood over the tray on the rubber bands. Moving the tray slightly sets the suspended wood wobbling. The hubster was planning on making us an electrical shake table that we could build lego on with a variable shake dial, but his wisdom teeth extraction intervened and a quickly thrown together manual shake table had to do.
The kids built various wooden block structures on the shake table and saw which was strongest. Short/Tall, Weight low down/Weight high up, then we tried some base isolation, using dish sponges, talcum powder and later Jello to separate the buildings from the "ground". The kids thought using Jello was hilarious. It definitely proved a point though, because the structures on the "isolated bases" really did withstand more shaking. My two have enjoyed playing with the table at home quite a bit, having competitions building towers next to each other and seeing whose falls first in a quake.
I made a tonne of home made play dough for us to roll out and layer up and see what effects pushing and squashing had on the shapes of the layers of sedimentary rock. All the kids liked that project too and when we were done we used the play dough to make baking soda volcanoes.I'm from the UK and I'm not sure if the baking soda and vinegar volcano is just a big thing in the US for kids or if I led a sheltered upbringing back home, because I'd never heard of it until I came out here and learned that it's a bit of a school science fair cliche for Americans. My kids thought it was the greatest thing since ice pops when we did this at the beginning of the year and the novelty hasn't worn off, so we keep doing it. I set them up with some cardboard to make a cone and we stuck the cone over a couple of old vitamin tablet bottles, stuck it down with play dough and then for a laugh they endangered all their toy animals at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro.
The next day they took turns with their friends putting a table spoon of baking soda and a little water and food colouring into the bottle, then pouring on a quarter of a cup of vinegar and watching the eruptions.
Another one that the kids thought was great fun was the home made geyser. We used a laundry detergent bottle and some tubing and a bike pump, so that when you filled the bottle up about half way and then pumped air in with the bike pump, the pressure built up and the only way for the pressure to be released was by a cork blowing out and the water being pushed out in a geyser like spurt. I don't have any "operational photos" for this one though :( Just a diagram I drew and what the hodge podge looked like.
Of course, if you're feeling daring (Jeni was) and everyone stands back, you can always pop some Mentos in a bottle of Diet Coke (and then run)...
I did get a few pics from the hats we made last week though. The kids scrunched up a sheet of foil a wee bit and then rolled it flat with a rolling pin.
Then we folded the circle in half and bend over the rounded edge to seal it like a calzone. Then they cut along the straight edge of the semi circle, to open up the Admiral Nelson style hat. I folded over the edges for them, so there was no chance of a sharp bit of foil nicking them. You can make bowler hats quite easily by scrunching a few sheets over a head or an appropriate sized bowl too.
I give you this seasons fashion in anti government mind-probe-wear for the clinically insane. Très chic? Mais non!
While they decorated the hats with stickers, markers and punched holes in them to thread laces and pipecleaners with beads, I decided to try and make a sombrero for Cinco de Mayo. I laid out four strips of foil into a kind of nearly octagon shape and scrunched them down over a bowl, then we rolled the brim flat with the rolling pin and I shaped the head bit a little more by hand. 
My oldest decorated it with sharpie pens. 
Both kids loved how humungous it was. It's still hung up in the kitchen. I am a little sad that it is too small for me. I really like how you don't really need anything other than a roll of tin foil. I mean there's no glue, no tape, no string required unless you want to decorate your creations. I want to scrunch some foil onto a couple of pairs of the girl's shoes to make temporary sparkly genie shoes with curled up toes next, and let them glue on jewels or pom poms or something. I'll try to remember to post a pic if we do that.
I marked a load of dots in the tops of the boxes and the kids used the rocks to hammer the nails in on the dots, then they pulled the nails out and used the holes as a guide to start screwing the wood screws in. Both my girls have used screwdrivers a lot recently with different projects and the lads loved this activity too. They all got the clockwise to screw in and anticlockwise to screw out thing by the end. 
I intend to make scratch mits from the wee feet bits to go with a hat and the leg warmers. These are probably all going to be a bit too small for my freind's baby, or will only fit her for a few weeks at most (although she is on the dinky side), but my friend also has a little girl who is almost three and adores baby dolls, so they will make a nice matching ensemble for her baby to wear next to her little sister wearing the genuine Babylegs.
Got lots more tights to make other little matching outfits and some of the tights are 24 months, so they might work out larger. I need to get some elastic to finish the scratch mits for the dollies though.
Last week we the peddle barbie corvette that we got for $5 in a yard sale last spring was pronounced dead, following a collision that rendered it's stearing unfixable without welding gear. On the weekend the kids got to play at being mechanics in the sun while the grown ups were taking apart other scavenged electronics for parts for future projects. They spent a good two to three hours unscrewing all the screws on it, some whilst lying on a skate board under the car like the real mechanics do. Later that evening my four year old daughter says to us "after dinner, can we go outside and screw again?" You try not laughing. FAIL.
Monday heralded an experiment in home dentistry. Both the kids are interested in the dentist after a trip a couple of months ago, the younger one was quite nervous about the genuine dentist's trip though, so I thought maybe some playing at being dentists with her sister would make it less scary. Turns out a four year old's booster seat makes a great make believe dentist's chair, and an old blue dress shirt of mine that had already been used to be a nurse worked out as the costume. They decided they needed goggles too. We got a cup of water and a bowl to spit the rinse in and they brushed each other's teeth and counted each other's teeth and my older daughter took great pleasure in telling my younger daughter all about how to look after her teeth.
The best ones are when you get to just sit back and watch the crazy unfold. This month the kids have been obsessed with volcanos (we did the classic volcano science experiment a while back). They have on several ocassions lately, declared there to be "a volcano in twenty minutes!" and then crammed all the stuff from their bedroom into the home made space rocket to escape/evacuate. The most recent volcano wasn't nearly so troublesome because aparently "the aliens say that we can stay with them for a while". One of the previous volcano evacuations was hampered by someone being stuck in a tree full of mice (I swear this is the stuff I deal with daily and I am going to be so sad when it inevitably starts to subside with age). In the mean time, we need volcano insurance.
