Unplugged Project - Bottle

We participated in this week's Unplugged Project again. The theme this week is Bottle!

Here is a description of the science project lead by my sweet husband.
Take an empty wine bottle and put some vinegar in it.
Then take a balloon and put some baking soda in it.
Carefully without spilling the baking soda, slide the opening in the balloon onto the top of the wine bottle.
When ready, pick up the top of the balloon so that the baking soda spills into the bottle.
When baking soda and vinegar mix, the released gas blows up the balloon.

Enjoy!

Unplugged Project : Float

We participated in this week's Unplugged Project again. The theme this week is FLOAT and we decided to do more science projects. My kids are pretty little so this was super simple, but we really had a fun time making predictions about what would happen and trying different things out as we thought of them.

The original idea came from yet another library book - this one called Boats, Ships, Submarines and Other Floating Machines by Ian Graham.

So basically we started by filling a bowl with water and talking about how some things float and some things sink. After discussing that heavy things sink, we talked specifically about play-doh. When I put a ball of play-doh in the water, it sunk of course. But when I made the play-doh into a boat like shape then it floated. This is to show that it also has to do with the shape and not just the weight.

After that we floated a metal jar lid and I let the boys mess around with it to figure out in what situations it would float and when it would sink. They really had a nice time with that, and got a little wet which is always a plus for kids.

I confess I also tried another activity from the book to make a submarine but was not quite able to get it to work. Maybe tomorrow we will give that another shot.

I did take photos but this project was not very photogenic so there wasn't really anything worth posting.

Unplugged Project : Balance

We finally got another chance to participate in an Unplugged Project. I have really missed doing them and wanted to get back into it this week. So I was super-excited to see this week's theme - BALANCE - and knew immediately what I wanted to do.

We read a lot of science books from the library and one topic we seem to hit a lot is simple machines. As soon as I saw the theme was balance, I thought of a lever and remembered that one of our current library books even had some ideas for activities related to levers.

The book is called How Things Work:Lifting by Levers by Andrew Dunn. The activity is to balance a ruler (we used a tongue depressor) and experiment with moving some quarters around to get it in balance. I don't want to explain all the science here but it was very cool. We started with 1 quarter on each side and equal distance from the center (fulcrum) and then added a quarter to one side and discussed how we could get it back in balance. There are several ways, one is moving the single quarter further out.

Anyway, I am probably not explaining it great but we had a really fun time and I know it made levers a lot clearer for me and hopefully for my six-year old too. Check out the book at your local library and you can try it too!

As I was writing this, I felt like I had written about simple machines before. Turns out for a previous unplugged project we also made a simple machine, a pulley out of tinker toys.