Weather 2. More color fun.

I love the 'Rainbow Milk' experiment. The effects are immediate and fascinating, plus it is an ever-changing kaleidoscope.

simple ingredients for a complex effect

All you need is milk - we made this a variable by trying whole, 2% and skim -,  Dawn dish detergent (an essential part of every science cupboard), food color and a Q tip. I used the three primary food colors (R, B and Y), to get the best variety of hues.

Pour the milk into a shallow dish and add a drop of each food color at the edge, each one being spaced at about 1/3 of the circumference. Dip a plain Q tip into the middle of the dish, is there any effect? Nope. Now have the kids put a drop of dawn on the Q tip and repeat - WOW!!!! The spots of color vanish and as you hold the Qtip in place, they reappear, swirling up from beneath and mixing to make all the secondary colors and more. Watching the dish is so rewarding as every few seconds another eddy of color pops up and twirls. After 10 seconds the Q tip is removed but the effects just keep going all lesson long!

soon after removing the Q tip

10 minutes later

At this point it is hard to start anything else, so, keeping the dish in the middle of the table, I got the children to make a 'color spinner' from a paper plate and markers. The children ask a lot of questions about the effects we are seeing in the milk. "What happens if you leave the Q tip in?", What if you swirl the milk up yourself?", "Where do the colors go when you put the Dawn in?", "Why?" The Dawn detergent breaks the surface tension of the milk molecules, which is the only thing holding the colors at the edge of the dish. The fat molecules in the milk (whole milk works best here) start to move around, pushing the color molecules every which way and producing the marvelous effects we see here.

The plate coloring for the spinners is encouraged to be 'scribble scrabble' - you would be amazed at how a lot of children cannot bring themselves to do that! Anyway, I put a toothpick in the middle of the finished plates and showed the children how to spin them - the original design and colors are blurred and often appear completely different as the pictures go past our eyes too fast to register on the brain. Once they got the knack of spinning the children were really enthusiastic - and impressed that the messier the plate, the better the effect!

making the color spinners

 

A really popular class lesson that takes on a life of its own!

rainbows and weather

Since almost every class I teach reports on the weather in their classroom, it makes a great introduction to this weather unit. When I ask 'What IS weather?', I get the weather report! "Sunny", "Cold", Raining","Windy", and so on. Why do we need to know what the weather is like? Well, wearing the right clothes is important for them, but I decided to show them how weather predictions can save lives, not just make us comfortable. Weather can be scary stuff so I started with the book 'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs' by Judi Barrett.


We then read a weather book about rainbows. This generated a lot of interest, the children telling me where and when, and if, they had ever seen a real rainbow, i.e. a weather-related one arcing across the sky. Some children had witnessed one from an airplane window, another child reported seeing them when they played in the sprinkler on a sunny day. I gave each child a triangular prism and they looked through these to try and see rainbows around the edge of the fluorescent lights. I then shone a flashlight through the prism to get a rainbow effect on a piece of white paper beneath. This was not as successful as I had planned, so I substituted 'rainbow viewers'.

here's lookin at you...

These are colored discs that look like the colored irises in our eyes, but instead of a black pupil there was an etched piece of plastic that refracted the light around any object they looked at - these were wildly successful. Even the 2's could use them.

Most of the children could identify some rainbow hues, many correctly and in order. We tried to sort pompoms  into rainbow order. One of the students found a unique way to do this with  markers.

rainbow pompoms

cool way to arrange markers in rainbow order

Finally the children drew a rainbow for their journals. Sounds easy but actually getting the arch right is a real fine motor skill, hence the freeform nature that resulted - but who cares when the colors are so wonderful!

Penguin Bowling

Who doesn't love penguins! Their images are everywhere, from the egg-caring Daddy Emperor to the crazy-haired Macaroni, and the combination of funny walks and survival under extreme weather conditions makes for great press!

Emperor penguin family

I got the children to tell me what they know about penguins - habitat, food, egg behavior, different species etc. The range of habitat surprised them, it's not just the South Pole! They knew a lot about certain penguins from movies which impressed me, but almost all of them believed the egg was cared for by the Dad, whereas it is only the Emperor that does this exclusively. Dads have a lot more 'padding' which makes them more tolerant of the long periods without food or movement on the ice than Moms. This piece of information generated conversations about whose Dad had his own padding - the honesty of preschoolers is eye-opening!

2 great books about penguins and eggs

We read these books  to learn more - the chicken Life Cycle book made a great comparison item - flightless birds and their eggs can be so different yet in many ways the same.

We finished by going Penguin Bowling! I glued photographs of different penguin species to bowling pins and set them up like a real bowling alley. Our bowling ball was a plastic egg! This activity was a huge hit. Many of the children have been bowling already and we had some impressive scores!

bowling pin penguins

the bowling alley

Wait time was alleviated by offering coloring activities, this offset the excitement of the game. The pictures they made can go into their journals!

creating a new penguin color scheme!

Food murals

The culmination of our previous investigations into food origins was to create a mural whereby pictures of food - raw food, not recipes- were pasted to one of four  backgrounds. An orchard, a vegetable farm, an animal farm and an ocean or river.

making an orchard

The students first had to engage in some research, finding appropriate pictures of food from magazines, and deciding which of the four origins they belonged to. They rapidly picked up that cookies and pizza were combinations of food, but that eggs, sugar, flour, tomatoes and cheese, some of the components of these favorite foods, these were the pictures we were looking for.

adding fruit to our orchard trees and bushes

meat and dairy farm foods

glueing food onto our ocean background

Next, each class painted a mural of one of the scenes, their choice (I had to talk some of them into oceans however, for some reason that seemed less exciting and certainly the plainest picture - blue blue blue!) and everyone cooperated. We cut out some tree trunks, suns, leaves, farmhouses etc and glued those on.

Finally, as many food pictures as could fit were glued onto the right scene, and don't they look fantastic! Our classroom looks like an Eden-like world of plenty now, and what fun everyone had doing it!

Our food mural - land-based farming

the artists survey their mural

little wizards: Foodknow-how - no it doesn't grow in the supermark...

little wizards: Foodknow-how - no it doesn't grow in the supermark...: Where does our food come from? That is the main concern of the next 4 weeks in our classroom. We 'shopped' for play food and sorted our gr...

little wizards: Playing with our food - NOT!

little wizards: Playing with our food - NOT!: Actually that's exactly what we DID do this week, the opposite of accepted food behavior. We had strict instructions to PLAY with our food ...

little wizards: Snowdays are anydays

little wizards: Snowdays are anydays: We had our first winter snowfall here in New York, so I thought it was a good time to talk about, and play with, both real snow and a popul...

little wizards: What is a ball?

little wizards: What is a ball?: I asked the children to share something they know about BALLS. This garnered some interesting, as well as predictable, responses! "Circle", ...

Playing with our food - NOT!

Actually that's exactly what we DID do this week, the opposite of accepted food behavior. We had strict instructions to PLAY with our food but NOT TO EAT IT. We made fantastic food art out of the skins, seeds, flesh and dyes of a load of different fruits and vegetables.

food art cornucopia

this was my favorite

the artist at work

The children both knew, and learned, about loads of common and uncommon food available to us now. Kudos to the families that offer kiwis, avocados and mushrooms to their families, I was amazed at what they knew about these foods even if they didn't like them. We studied the structure of fruit vs. veggies, including the confusing tomato which is really both, and the strawberry which wears its seeds on the outside. We squeezed red dye out of red chard, orange color out of carrots and purple out of blueberry skins. Then we painted with it! Everything got peeled and dissected and generally smushed around in order to get a sense of the many different materials forming our plant food.

ordinary and exotic foods to dissect

Milk and eggs, cheese and butter followed but I was not going to bring meat or fish into the classroom. We made do with illustrations for those. Quite a few children had been fishing actually and some had even eaten the catch! What a treat as well as a unique learning experience.
I hope the children identify some different foods the next time they visit the supermarket with parents, they will be impressed! The best food lesson we can give is to visit a working farm and have them pick and eat the stuff right from the plant - organic farms mean you can do just that!

Foodknow-how - no it doesn't grow in the supermarket!

Where does our food come from? That is the main concern of the next 4 weeks in our classroom.

We 'shopped' for play food and sorted our groceries into food groups. Fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, dairy, bread/grains. For each group I asked where the food came from. Overcoming the notion that it all miraculously grew in the supermarket took some doing! Even children who recalled visiting a farm or market didn't realise that that was where the food was grown, and that the supermarket selects stuff from the farm to be delivered. Orchards, where many children had picked fruit, seasonal farmstands and farms  where they got their pumpkins and vegetables, somehow these occasional and infrequent visits to the food source, had not been connected to the store where Mom and Dad took them for supplies. Animals were another dark area- chicken, steak and burgers got rave reviews on the menu, as did cheese, milk, eggs and butter,  but the idea that they were connected to real animals at all hadn't got to the front line! I guess eating animals can be an awkward fact to convey given the conflicting lessons in kindness to animals, never mind pets, but most of the children didn't seem appalled by the idea, just surprised. I didn't push it too much however and we moved on to grains, and how plants go to a mill and get scrunched to make flour. Better to restrict our explorations to stuff that can be picked or plucked!!

We made pretend 'meals' out of the 'food', and they all know what a healthy meal is, that's for sure! What a lot of veggie-lovers in this generation, it's great!

Snowdays are anydays

We had our first winter snowfall here in New York, so I thought it was a good time to talk about, and play with, both real snow and a  popular polymer substitute, 'Insta-snow'.

Insta-snow powder

 

 

Each child got a cup of real snow and we talked about how it looked and felt - no tasting allowed! "Cold", "wet", "white", "clumps", "melts", were among the observations made.

Adding red food color to the snow showed interesting effects - how it spread to all the particles and made colored water.

pink snowballs!

We then added WARM water to the insta-snow powder, which felt gritty at first, then EXPLODED as each particle absorbed 300x its own weight of water. This was a huge "Oooh!" moment, and plunging a hand into the 'snow' was a mindblower because it was of course warm, as well as feeling soft and slippery. Caution: spilling this on the floor makes for a slippery surface - watch out! Now we could add red food color to our insta-snow and compare the effects to the real stuff. You have to squeeze to make the color spread here, otherwise it remains inside the polymer particle.

comparing real snow with insta-snow

squeezing the color out of the polymer

many shades of red

Hours of fun followed as the children made fantastical sculptures, mixing the two different snows and generally having a creative blast!

good hands-on fun!

What is a ball?

I asked the children to share something they know about BALLS. This garnered some interesting, as well as predictable, responses! "Circle", "soccer", "throw it", "basketball", "football", "bounce it", "roll it", and so on. Then came the question: "When is a ball not a ball?" Answer: "when it's a football!" Looking at a circle - in this case a plate - shows that to describe a ball as a circle is only partly right. It's a circle no matter which way you look at it. A ball has properties other shapes do not - this we could test by playing with a variety of balls of all sizes and materials. Sports balls made a good discussion starter because each sport has different rules of play, which are partly dictated by what kind of ball is being used. There is a huge difference between a ping pong ball, a basketball and a volleyball. Each of these is driven in  different way - with a bat, with hands or with wrists, yet they are the same shape. A football though is thrown and kicked but it's shape makes the trajectory very unpredictable - unless you are a football player!

Playing with all the different balls was the best way to illustrate the variety out there!

The following week the children were given a sheet of newspaper and asked how you would make it into a ball. First we ascertained it did not behave like a ball - no bouncing or rolling. How to do it? Well before long the children had scrunched it up - it was instinctive for many of them - they did it before they could verbalise what the procedure was.

from flat paper to a ball

Making the perfect ball

left on its own, the paper would attempt to regain it's flatness so I had the children suggest how we could keep the ball shape. "Glue", "tape", "string", were offered and we settled on taping. Now this behaved like a ball although nothing had been aded to the sheet of paper - only the SHAPE had been altered. We bounced and rolled for a while, then made a ball out of clay to compare. Clay stays in the molded shape and can be made smooth so is a better ball in many ways.

comparing paper and clay balls

Finally we used our paper balls to knock down some empty soda bottle 'skittles' - we did pretty well there!

As an extra brainteaser I asked the question: "Can you make a circle out of toothpicks or straws?" The unanimous answer was "No!" but some children were able to say WHY. They conveyed the fact that the picks/straws were not 'bendy', using their hands to explain this if they couldn't come up with the right words. Well, as long as the circle is BIG enough, then the answer became "Yes we can!"

making a circle out of straight lines

Information technology made easy

Almost from birth, kids are exposed, and expert, in manipulating digital information Two year-olds can use a touch screen better than me. So, I had a 'blast from the past' with the information technology  I grew up with, eventually graduating to the kinds of interfaces they will feel at home with. First of all:

33rpm vinyl LP on a record player

I found this old player on its way to the junkyard - and it works! Totally mechanical which is great for understanding as well.  I told the classes that I had no TV until I was 8 - stunned silence. The only way to get news or stories or music was with a radio. They all associated a radio with music, not with stories or news, and of course unless you listen to NPR or the two news stations, that's all you hear today. The idea that it all starts with electricity was clear when we tried to get the radio to work - some of the kids knew there had to be power and guessed batteries or plugs correctly. How the radio worked was less easy to understand so I settled for letting them imagine all the programs playing in the air but that we cannot hear them, like some animals can hear or smell things that we cannot. Powering up the radio enabled the signals to get 'decoded' for our ears. We played and danced to some music on different types of station - jazz, techno, classic rock and classical. Then I described how to listen to music you selected in a time when Pandora was just a character in a myth. Good old vinyl!

Only one child in the whole school recognized an LP, but a number of them must have seen a record player in operation because they knew where to put the record on the player, and that it rotated. The 'arm' with its needle underneath was more of a mystery, but when the music emerged they were at once surprised and delighted - more so than if I had put a CD on. The record was "Walk Like An Animal" and they immediately began to obey the directions as we went through inchworms, dogs, chickens and so on. I followed with Jackie Torrance reading some fairy tales and they were spellbound by 'Little Red Riding Hood', insisting on hearing the whole story. It was unusual for them to listen without some kind of video input and the 4 year-olds did brilliantly, the 3's less so but mostly they still listened.

45 rpm, The Clancy brothers and Tommy Makem

 

 

We also listened to a 45 rpm, smaller and needing a faster rotation to sound normal.
Moving on, most of the children mis-identified a CD as a DVD. I showed them the more intense 'rainbow effect' of the DVD since it has to hold far more information. We then listened to a Zoo animals CD and brainstormed about how the sound was stored here versus the vinyl record. The rainbow effect clued a few of them in about the role of light in 'reading' the CD sounds.

Playing a CD

They saw that both items were circular, flat and rotated on their players, that they were light and easy to move, but fragile and easily scratched. Next time we will move on to video information, although they were clamoring for more Jackie Torrance as well. Haul out those LPs, parents and grandparents, your little ones have a new appreciation of them!

Worm cake, anyone?

We were inspired by reading 'Max's Worm Cake' by Rosemary Wells, to make our own cake - no, not an edible one (old hat) but exactly like Max's in the book, using real dirt and worms and pebbles to decorate it.

worm cake and candles

 We talked about dirt last time when worms were on the menu (so to speak), but here we get a chance to handle it, observe some of its properties and - of course - squish and squinch it in our hands! The feeling of mud gave everyone a chance to come up with a word to describe the sensation - not just "EEUUUWW".  One child described worms as "squirdling through the mud". Wow!! What a terrific new word!

First we compared dirt and sand - it's makeup, where it's found, how it feels before and after adding water. It is easier to mold when wet, and we noticed that sand had larger particles so the mud felt 'smoother'.

comparing sand (L) and dirt (R)

handling sand

sand cake! with candle!

It was tricky to add the right amount of water to the mud - depends on how fine the particles were. Too much and you got sludge, too little and it looked dry - just like adding water to flour mix when making pastry. No-one seemed to mind putting their hands into the mix eventually, it was a lot more effective than a craft stick!

mixing water into the dirt

oops! too much water!

permission to get my hands muddy!

 I had colored starch packing 'noodles' for candles - interestingly the children observed that the noodles disintegrated ("melted") in the mud as the starch dissolved - not something you would see with a polystyrene 'noodle'.

Finally - the finished cake! A masterpiece only a worm could love!

want a slice?

As a completely different chemical process, we compared the mud with so-called 'clean mud' - made by mixing a grated Dove soap bar with torn-up pieces of a toilet paper roll,  and adding a cup of warm water to mix. The children were more interested in tearing up the paper and grating the soap than in the finished 'mud',  AND - they really didn't like the feel of it at all. More children were willing to plunge their hands in  real mud than in this stuff, maybe because the texture was kind of slimy.

making 'clean mud'

OK but we prefer the real thing, worms and all!

 

That's it for Rocks and Minerals, folks! Next stop - Information Technology!

What's in the dirt? Worms!

This is such a simple and fascinating lesson - and all you need is a bucket of dirt from the garden and some magnifying glasses! It's an extension of our Rocks and Minerals theme as well.

plate o' dirt. spot the worm!

Each child got a plate of dirt (I made sure there was a worm hidden in there first) and we talked about what 'dirt' was. A few children told me is was 'rocks' because there were some small rocks in their sample. Others had leaves and sticks and roots so I could explain how all these things got scrunched up and turned into soil. I also told them there were dead bugs in there which was good for the soil and plants.

Then they got to poke around some more and - hey presto - they found worms. This was accompanied by shrieks of delight and "Eeeuuuuw!" Now the best part - touching them! At first a lot of the children were horrified at the thought but there were always some kids who loved this, and they would inspire the others. I only got 2 or 3 children out of 200 who refused to hold them in their hands.

tickly!

look! two worms!

 They were pleasantly surprised to find that the worms felt tickly, not slimy, AND that they moved relatively slowly. Lively bugs are much more difficult to get used to. The children could use the magnifying glasses to study their worms but the major interest from their perspective was having them in their hands.
Placing some worms on a clean plate enabled us to study how they moved better. I got the children to 'wriggle like a worm' on the floor.

wriggle like a worm

worms reacting to water - not happy!

Now we added a drop or two of water to the worms - this got the whole crew of them to make a break for it! It was fun to watch because they have no vision apart from light/dark so they just kept on truckin' until they were out of the area - and many of them ended up crawling off the plate like spokes in a wheel. They dangle off the edge, feeling around for a surface, some retract but some go too far and fall off which the children found hysterically funny. Flashlights made the worms move away as well but cheerios were more interesting. The children got to guess at the reasons worms don't like water or light, and how they eat.

Finally, we made a big pile of dirt and dumped all the worms on top - within minutes they had disappeared as they ate their way inside the pile to escape the light and to stay moist so they can breathe (through their skin). The class had considered a lot of things about worm physiology and behavior during the processes, and it made total sense to them because they had seen and touched and watched the worms in action!

'Wonderful Worms' by Linda Glaser is a terrific book about these critters, and I had a bunch of others available for the children to browse though.

reading about worms

More books about garden critturs help reinforce the fact that our gardens hide a wealth of life we never  see.