Monday with Arielle
Opening Activity: Decorate craft stick magnet. Make marshmallow molecules!
Circle Time: - Date/Time/Weather
- Story: "The Magic School Bus & the Science Fair"
- Singing Time
Snack: cheese, crackers, fruit
Wiggle Time: “Branches of Science”. Look for bugs, plants, and rocks, clouds,
sun, and moon; discuss different sciences.
Lesson: Can we be scientists? What is a
hypothesis? Experiment – is it magnetic?
Craft: Make an atom by gluing pom-pom protons, neutrons, and electrons on paper. Which element will you make?
Wednesday with Naomi
Opening Activity: Puzzles and Dot to Dot coloring
Circle Time:
- Date/Time/Weather
- Story- "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" (Talk about how Science helps us to know that caterpillars turn into butterflies. Talk about our own observations of our pet Praying Mantis, Joey. Discuss the way Joey's eyes change colors, the way he camouflages and hunts, the way he eats, the habitat he prefers etc. Now that we have observed Joey for 3 weeks, we will let him go back into the wild!)
- Music Dice (Roll giant dice with song names on them, then sing the songs)
Snack: Mini Apple Pies (Peel and chop apples, dust them with brown sugar and cinnamon, roll them into store bought crescent rolls, brush melted butter on top and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar mixture, and then bake.) Talk about how the apples start out hard but then get soft. Talk about the dough being soft and squishy and then becoming more firm and crispy. Make a hypothesis as to why this happens.
Wiggle Time: How will our bodies react when we…? Pick a motion and then hypothesize what will happen to your body when you do it. (i.e. What will happen to my body when I run around in circles 10 times? What will happen to my heart if I jump up and down 20 times?)
Lesson: Remind children what a hypothesis is
and what a scientist does. Talk to them about the importance of experimenting – start Freeze & Frost experiment
Lesson Application Activity:
Science Experiments! (All Experiments were copied verbatim from A+'s "Science Projects: Physics Tricks" a workbook that I found in the Target dollar bins! They are NOT my own!)
1. Magic Balloon
What you Need:
- Small water or juice bottle, empty and rinsed out (The top should be small enough that you can stretch the opening of a balloon over it.)
- Latex balloon (new)
- 4 tablespoons vinegar
- 2 tablespoons baking soda
Result Timing:
5 minutes
Directions:
- Pour vinegar into the bottle
- Using a small funnel, or a piece of paper shaped into a cone, spoon the baking soda into the balloon.
- Holding the balloon so that the baking soda doesn't tip into the bottle, stretch the opening of the balloon to fit over the neck of the bottle.
- Slowly straighten out the balloon and tip it upside down so that the baking soda falls into the vinegar in the bottle. What happens?
- Draw pictures of the balloon and bottle as they looked before and after the experiment.
When you mix substances like vinegar and baking soda, you cause a chemical reaction. The chemical reaction changes the original ingredients in some way. In this case, vinegar and baking soda react to each other and produce carbon dioxide. Although carbon dioxide is an invisible gas, we can spot in in two stages of this experiment: First, when the baking soda is dumped into the vinegar, carbon dioxide is produced and it makes the vinegar bubble. Second, the carbon dioxide rises through the vinegar into the air where it's caught in the balloon. The reaction should produce enough carbon dioxide to at least partially blow up the balloon.
What you Need:
- 4-6 drops of vegetable oil
- Water faucet
- Liquid or bar soap for hand washing
Result Timing:
10 minutes
Directions:
- Holding your hands over the sink, put about 4-6 drops of oil into one hand and then rub your hands together.
- Turn the cold water on and let the water run over your hands. What happens when the water touches the coating of oil on your hands? Try to remember what your hands look like so that after they are clean again you can draw how the water looked on your hands.
- Rub some soap into your hands and put them back in the water. What happens when the water touches your clean hands?
Water is made of extremely tiny pieces called molecules. The molecules of water stick together very tightly. The molecules that make up oil are arranged differently from water molecules, so when they're put together, the oil molecules won't easily dissolve into the water. You probably noticed that the water rolled off your oily hands rather than washing the oil off with it-the water molecules stick to other water molecules rather than grabbing onto the oil molecules.
What you Need:
- Cereal bowl
- Skim milk
- Red, Blue, and Yellow liquid food coloring. (Gel food coloring won't work in this experiment)
- 1 tablespoon of liquid dish detergent
Result Timing:
5 minutes
Directions:
- Fill the cereal bowl with skim milk. (not quite to the top.)
- Gently add a few drops of red color into the milk in a small spot at the edge of the dish. Repeat with blue and yellow, moving around the dish's edge so that each color is as far from the other two colors as you can make it. Do not stir the milk or jiggle the bowl!
- Slowly pour a little detergent into the middle of the bowl. Make predictions as to what colors will appear when the primary colors are mixed. Draw and color what you see.
Just like water, milk is made of molecules, tiny pieces that stick together. They stick so closely that when you put in food coloring, the food coloring (for the most part) just sits on top of the milk. Scientists call this trick surface tension-the molecules stick together as if there is an invisible skin across the top of the milk. When you add detergent to the milk, it pulls the milk molecules apart so that surface tension is weakened. The milk and detergent molecules move around, and so does the food coloring! Where the colors mix, you may see a little green, orange, or purple.
What you Need:
- Metal coffee can with plastic lid (empty, clean and dry, or a small stainless steel mixing bowl, plastic wrap and a runner band.)
- 8-10 ice cubes
- 1/2 cup of salt
- Spoon
Result Timing:
30 minutes
Directions:
- Put the ice cubes in the coffee can.
- Pour the salt on top of the ice cubes and then use the spoon to stir the salt and ice a few times.
- Put a lid on top of the container, or cover it tightly with plastic wrap and a rubber band.
- Let the can sit on a table or counter. Check back in 10 minutes and again at 20 and 30 minutes. Do you see anything happening on the outside of the container? Write down what you observe every 10 minutes.
You should see frost forming on the outside of the container, starting at the bottom, within 10-20 minutes. If the ice cubes are on the inside of the container, why did frost form on the outside of the container?
It's because of a process called condensation. Even when there's not a cloud in the sky, there is water we can't see - water vapor - in the air around us. As the temperature cools, some of that invisible water vapor changes into liquid water that we can see and touch. In our experiment, the ice causes the sides of the container to become much cooler than the air around the container. This cooling caused the water vapor to change into liquid water where it touched the container and then to freeze, forming a coating of frost.
Friday Field Trip
Visit your local Children's Museum. There are often FREE days at the museum or Groupons and other offers that can make it less expensive. Be sure to invite some friends!
