Fizzy Foamy Science

A received this great kit from his aunties. It's the perfect starting out kit for younger ones since everything fizzes and foams.

 

 The first experiment was a version of the fizzing volcano. If I remember correctly we mixed water and citric acid, then added baking soda to finish the reaction.

 There were enough materials for each of the boys to participate and they took turns measuring out all of their ingredients. The kit comes with everything we needed except for basics like bowls and something to catch the explosion in.

 Love this picture of A seeing his experiment working! He closely examined the results to see if he could find air bubbles.

Slime Science

J LOVES "doing" science and he was fortunate enough to receive some really cool science kits for Christmas and his birthday. We've been doing an experiment from one or the other about once a week.

 He got this Slime Science kit from his lovely aunties. I would highly recommend it, according to the box there is a whole collection of "Slinky Brand" science kits, I'm sure we'll be trying out some more of them.

 We've made two of the slimes so far. I'm not sure why he looks bored out of his mind in this pictures, he really was enjoying it.

 The kit comes with everything you need to complete the experiments. So far we've been able to make two batches (one for J and one for A) with material left over.

 This was a version of a pretty typical make at home glue and borax slime.

 This one, though hard to see in my pictures, was pretty gross. It was a pretty good representation of snot and it gave me the heeby geebies.

I think there are eight experiments in this kit so we have a ways to go. The kit also comes with heavy duty recipe cards and full explanations for all of the experiments.

Egyptian Golden Bracelets

 This was a quick activity that kept the boys happy (anything with paint keeps them happy) and utilized things we had on hand. I covered the table with butcher paper and gave the boys a jar of yellow paint, paint brushes, and a toilet paper roll.

 The yellow is supposed to represent gold. They painted their tubes all over and then we set them up to dry.

 I seem to have a problem getting final results pictures but basically once the tubes were dry I cut them in half (making two bracelets out of each tube) and them cut them open up one side so that they can be "wrapped" around an arm.

J wrapped his arms up and pretended to be a mummy, which gave me about three minutes of silence. Sometimes I forget what silence is like :).

Making Phoenician Dye

This activity came from The Story of the World Volume I Activity Guide and went along with our chapter on the Phoenicians.

 It's a very simple way to make dye, the other option involved purple cabbage and alum, neither of which we had on hand. We put two cups of frozen blueberries in a pot and set it on the stove to simmer for one hour. We made sure to stir occasionally to prevent it from burning to the bottom.

 Once the blueberries have cooked for one hour you end up with a purple goo of a semi liquid consistency. We used a strainer with a bowl underneath to collect the juice. I had to run some water through the goo in order to get the juice to drain out.

 Once we had a liquid we dumped in some macaroni noodles and let them soak for a few minutes until they started to take on the purple liquid.

I don't have pictures of the remaining steps but we drained the liquid and then dumped the macaroni on a piece of freezer paper to air dry. The next morning I could tell that it was going to take a long time to dry so I spread the noodles on a cookie sheet and put them in the oven on "warm" until they were dry to the touch. 

We'll be making necklaces using the noodles but I have to pick up some needles that the boys can use to push the string through. In hind site I would have chosen a pasta that has much bigger openings for this project, but I was using what we had on hand.