Food - Day One

This morning Rose drew me a picture of something I couldn't figure out at all, this is not unusual but when I asked her what it was she said it was a machine where you put in salty water which then evacuated and there was milk left.  Well I never, obviously the useless still made an impression on someone.  Jacob is so clever (and quite loudly so) and Rose is so different that I often forget that she is pretty smart too.

Anyway, on with food.  Today we performed an 'acid-base reaction' with vinegar and baking soda courtesy of Science Bob in order to demonstrate how you get air bubbles in muffins.  It was kind of successful, we certainly made plenty of carbon dioxide but I didn't put the balloon on the bottle properly so it didn't inflate normally, if you try to do this get as much of the neck of the balloon as possible over the bottle.

Then we made oatmeal yoghurt muffins, the sort where you add baking soda to yoghurt to make it frothy before you bake it in order to try to show how air bubbles make cakes fluffy.

I'm not sure how much of the science went in, especially as my explanations are less than great but the finished muffins went down well.

Week Two - Food

This week we have decided to look at food, I had been wondering about sun/heat/light so I could try out the still again but the forecast is not good so we'll go for some stuff we can do inside instead.  Here's my list of planned activities...

• Conduct an experiment to demonstrate how yeast works
• Bake bread
• Inflate a balloon with baking soda
• Make muffins
• Grow cress and eat it
• Sprout sunflower seeds
• Make prints with veggies
• Have a blind tasting
• Make marshmallow shooters

I thought about going to a pick your own but only cherries are in season around here and I've still got about 2lb in the fridge that Gary gave me last week, maybe we'll save that for another time.

Our food words so far are 'taste', 'flavour', 'germinate' and 'microorganism', I might think of some more as the week goes on.  I shall make Jacob read a couple of poems again and Rose has been really loving the traceable alphabet sheets so you'll probably see some more of those.

So there you go, I think we'll start with muffins and baking soda balloons tomorrow and take it from there.

Water - Summary

I think that went pretty well, it definitely broke up the days and the kids enjoyed it.  All the crafts/experiments worked except for the still, Jacob and I measured our water on Saturday and we had purified just under 5mls (about a teaspoon), I don't think we'll be replacing Ray Mears as survival experts anytime soon.  Also we missed out irrigation but maybe we'll try again when I have outside the grounds photo capabilities.

Rose's favourite activity was marbling paper, she keeps asking to do it again, and Jacob's was the water fight.  I'm not sure about mine, not the still that's for sure.  You've definitely not seen the last of that, I won't be defeated by a kids science experiment.

Water - Day Four

Day four, what am I doing? it's not like I have nothing else to do.  Oh well.

Today we had a craft day with bonus water fight when it stopped raining.  First the kids made water and space(?) pictures using the paper we marbleized what seems like months ago.  Rose says her fish are swimming behind coral, you would be right in suspecting that she has heard of coral but never seen any.  Jacob made a rocket going to Mars and an underwater volcano with fish swimming between the lava flows.

When all that was done we made water bombs out of washing up sponges, I found this craft on a website called Babble.  We made ours in 2 different colour waves so there would be no arguing about who's was who's, then we tried them out.

These are Rose's

This is not as bad as it looks, she missed then got very upset because Jacob didn't.  The water fight was abandoned when the crying started and we set up a firing range of plastic receptacles from the recycling box to knock down instead, that went down really well until I got the photography equipment out and Rose decided to look sad.

No more joy with the still.  I am giving it until tomorrow afternoon as that will be 3 days and if it hasn't purified several pints of liquid we will all have had it!  Today was brought to you by the letter K.

Water - Day Three

Our solar still has not produced any water yet, I think we may officially die of thirst soon.  Jacob says that stills don't work but I think there is not enough direct sunlight in the sun room so I've put it out on the patio to see if we can purify anything this afternoon.

The kids were up for some more experiments today so we did some hastily prepared, extra curricular stuff.  First we 'floated' a paper clip on water to demonstrate surface tension.  I found this on Science Bob, you use a small piece of tissue paper or Kleenex to place the clip flat on the surface of the water then push the tissue away with the end of the pencil and the paper clip will stay on the surface.  Both children managed to do it which was good.

Rose takes very accurate scientific observations

Then we had huge amounts of fun with the upside down cup trick.  The scientific explanation for this is on Morning Coffee Physics, it is all to do with air pressure outside the cup vs slightly lower pressure inside the cup.  For obvious reasons this went down very well!

It's water fight day tomorrow, not sure if this is a good thing or not.  Also it has occurred to me that the laptop mysteriously died the day after Jacob's interesting suggestion of seeing if it would work under water.  Mmmm.

Water - Day Two

I was thinking we might get to the beach today as this morning it was properly hot without a howling gale, however a series of impressive storms blew through before we had got our act together and we had to do some indoor stuff instead.

So we had a go at building a solar still, we used these instructions from PBS Kids.  Here are the kids mixing salt into water to make sea water.

And here is jacob after he tested a tiny bit of salt water on his finger to check it was salty.

And here is the finished still.

Unfortunately, the sun has stayed steadfastly behind the clouds since we set up so we have caught no water yet, if we were on a real desert island we would all be having a thirsty night.  On the upside, we went out after the storms finished to take some weather readings and this is how full the rain gauge was.

That was a good bit of rain for an hour or so, perhaps we should just have put the bowl outside and dispensed with the still building shenanigans.  The observant among you will notice the clothes discrepancy between yesterday and today, I'm afraid that laptop disaster happened before I blogged and all but 1 of yesterday's pics had to be re-staged.  Oops

Water - Day One

Today we got busy with 2 activities and quite a bit of enthusiasm.

We made a rain gauge out of an empty cranberry juice bottle and some duct tape and set it up in the garden.  This wasn't too exciting as sharp knives and semi accurate measuring meant that I did most of the actual making.  Installing it in the garden was a bit more interesting until Rose accidentally poked J in the eye with the end of a thermometer, fortunately it was not serious and we managed to apologize and move on.  The bottom of the bottle was not flat so we decided to have a 'baseline' about an inch high.  Here is Jacob pouring water in up to the line.

And here they are with the offending thermometer.

Voila, the Pinetree Drive weather station is complete.  Do you think that daily readings will be taken throughout summer?  No, me neither.

Next we marbled some paper, the idea was a sort of demonstration of the principle that molecularly different liquids don't mix and oil floats on water.  We used the oil and food colour method I found on the Unplug Your Kids website (there are no pictures but the instructions are pretty clear).  Here is an action shot.

The kids really enjoyed doing this, anything that involves goop generally goes down well, and the results were really pretty.

I thought we'd got away without too much mess until we were on the way to the park when I realized that Rose looked like she was splattered with blood.  Note to self, don't give Rose the red ink next time.