The Anti-List for the holidays

The exams are finally, finally over for the twins. Jordan finished much earlier but Evan's drudgery only ended yesterday. Coincidentally, I was asked to write a piece about holidays activities. I thought about it and Packrat and I are pretty much of the opinion that JED, having relatively busy school days should be allowed to do nothing during the holidays. There is a great amount of value in giving them time to be bored.

So our default is to let them come up with their own games , read, go to the library, hang out and go downstairs to muck about or to explore new parks. And oh! Evan has asked for us to go back to Willing Hearts to do some work there. That, we'll definitely do at some point this June.

There. Done.

But I don't think that was what I was asked to write about though.

And honestly, there have been times where we've needed to park the kids somewhere so as to not drive their care-givers crazy while we were away or because they really wanted to learn something new.

So, the list that I'm sharing is of places that JED have tried before and have had quite a bit of fun with.

a. Art camps
A big hit even at this point with the twins being 10. There's always joy in mucking about with paint and creating something from it. We have excellent pieces on our walls courtesy of these art camps and it brings JED so much joy from being able to see their work on the walls.

We've done a few and some are better than others. We did one where I was told the kids weren't listening to instructions and painting it as they were told. We never went back there again even though it was close by us. We have however gone to heART Studio many times over even though it's further away. Their holiday programmes are by the day so it's great if you want them occupied for a couple of hours; though I'm tempted to sign Muffin up for the 2 day Dinosaur one.

b. Science camps.
I've heard that the BASF Science Labs for June are all filled up already and science camps are a whole lot of experimenty fun. The one that we really liked and we sent them to while we were away was a Discovery Vacation Camp which was a 5 day full day camp where they did experiments, went on field trips and actually learnt stuff they remember till today. The only thing about that was that Jordan said she felt homesick. Because it was longer than the typical school day. But that said, she remembers it fondly and they went as a big group of friends so it was a lot of fun.

c. Writing camps
Though only the twins have gone for writing camps, Muffin remembers fondly the time he sat in one with the twins. This was Monsters Under the Bed's Monsters HuntINK camp a few years back. I think at that point, they were still too young for it but they talk about the hydra and the medusa that they learnt about during that workshop. And then, there was the workshop they did last year, where they wrote and published their own book.

They would be happy if I sent them back to any of the ones above but what they really really want to go for is a building workshop where they learn coding and creating games because that's often what is on their minds these days. Evan got his hands on a flyer for the Tink Tank one and has cancelled off the ones that he's learnt in school like Scratch and decided that he wanted to do the MBot and Sphero one. Muffin is keen because he knows that Sphero built the BB-8 we have rolling around the house, though I cautioned him that it wasn't what he was going to build in 2 hours there. Jordan was torn between that and another workshop called Little Bits where you learnt to work with circuitry but Packrat said if they were going, they were ALL going to the same workshop.

There. A list. Of what I would do, what they could do if I gave them the chance to and what they really really want to do. 

All I can say is, I don't really care what we're going to do. I'm just ecstatic that the exams are over and we can do everything we want to or choose to do absolutely nothing.

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BASF Science Lab 2017: MuffinThe Young Scientist

JED love science.

They love science experiments which we used to do a lot of even before they started proper science in school. When they were able to read and we inherited a whole bunch of kid science magazines, they devoured it and there were magazines all through the house. All. Over. The. Place.


I credit the science programme they did in kindy for this early curiosity and I love that they surprise me with random bits of information.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure if it helps them in school but the point is in the fun.

It's Muffin's turn to be mad about science.

His favourite things about science.
1. Experiments.
The most fun ingredients for experiments are baking soda, detergent, vinegar. Lots of fizzing, lots of foaming and very very clean bathroom floors after that.

2. Muffin also loves Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye is irreverent, physically comedic and makes it over the top hilarious. There's an episode on life cycles that he loves and watches ad nauseum and chuckles when Bill Nye goes "Birth, Life, Death!"

3. Science magazines and books
All over the house, there are science comics and books. And when I mean, all over the house, it is everywhere, under the bed, under the pillow, in the bathroom, all over the dining table, everywhere. But he's constantly reading, thinking and popping up with weird questions that I now deputise his brother and sister to deal with.

4. More experiments!
We sometimes get the opportunity to go for science camps and labs. The twins went BASF Kids Lab last year and we brought Muffin too but he hid behind Packrat most of the time. He was intimidated by his siblings being there and able to answer all the questions, he was intimidated by all the older kids there that he didn't want to do any of the experiments.

This year, we were invited to the preview again. Since it was smack in the middle of exams for the two who actually do study science, I sent Muffin alone with his friend. Out of the shadows of his siblings and with his trusty best friend, the two boys had a rocking good time.

They got to dress like researchers, they got to record their findings and make oobleck (which is ALWAYS ALWAYS fun) and they got to meet Dr Bubbles; who in Muffin's opinion was Bill Nye!

Dr Bubbles a.k.a. Bill Nye!

Muffin wants to do the Discovery Science Camp during the June break like his siblings did. I'm saving that one though, when I need him in 'day-care' during a vacation and this June, we don't need that yet. He's also advocating for the BASF Kids' Lab to all his friends because he discovered there's a repeat session of what he did in June. This child, if he can't be a scientist, can sell things next time. Quite the marketer. 

So for those who have sciencey kids and want a day of science activity during the coming break, sign up and make oobleck and meet Dr Bubbles!

These spots go fast though so make like the wind and sign up.

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Experiment 3: Making fire

Because it's been crazy hot, we've been staying indoors.

But an off the cuff remark sent us all out of the house, into the sweltering afternoon, to make fire.

The heat led us to comment that it was how bush fires were made.

JED did not believe us.

At the same time, Jordan was brandishing a magnifying glass, muttering something about looking for clues.

Packrat then took the magnifying glass from her, braved the sweltering heat (he, especially, melts into a puddle within seconds) and gathered up some crinkled leaves, angled the sunbeams onto it and made fire.

The kids' jaws dropped in unison as the leaf crackled and smoked.

Each got a chance to do it and because it was blazing, it really didn't take much skill.

Man make fire

Son follows suit.

Leaf has big hole in it.

They wanted to make a bonfire but they were becoming Olaf in the summer. So they got shephereded in to have a shower.

While it was fun while it lasted, I still think we need to move to colder climates. 

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Experiment 2: Naked Eggs over Easter

Easter passed us by in a blur of church, Easter Egg hunts and chocolate eggs. At the same time, my niece and her mum decided to create a naked egg in lieu of the chocolate ones. It looked fascinating enough for me to look it up.

Concurrently, Jordan's started a new area in science. It's less nature, more physics/ chemistry; physical science. It requires a little bit more scaffolding than flora and fauna and it's not as instinctive for her.

So we embarked on the Naked Egg experiment to show certain the twins certain things.
1. Properties of materials can be altered.
2. Osmosis happens.

We documented it along the way with videos. Evan did a great job hosting the experiment and highlighting the different bits along the way.

Introducing the materials and observing the reaction between the eggshell and vinegar.



A few hours later when most of the hard shell had disintegrated into scum; very different from its hard but brittle shell previously.



Pretending to be the Mad Scientist, she updates us on the second part of the experiment where we were aiming to dye the egg thoroughly through osmosis with food colouring. She demanded a script!



Success! After 3 days of soaking, no more shell, totally dyed a hue of blue and purple- a rubberized egg that bounces. They remember the video where the egg was bounced too high and went splat so they bounced it gently.


Unable to resist that the egg would go splat; creating an eggs-plosion! And discovering to Mommy's disgust (not at all veiled in the video) that the yolk was still raw!

Conclusion: It's a neat magic trick of sorts. Not only did the shell disintegrate, the albumen solidified somewhat and blue dye didn't just colour the eggs, it stained the hands badly. On top of that, do the final "egg-plosion" outdoors and in worn-out clothes because the colour does.not.come.off! Lots of fun. Lots of mess. Lots of lessons and most importantly, little tedium.

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Experiment 1: Nature study

The twins are doing science this year. They spent much of last year excited about doing science this year. They read, they watched videos and they spewed scary non-sequiturs about poisonous/ deadly animals. They taught me the difference between a poisonous creature and a venomous one.

Unfortunately, school science is not just about remembering crazy facts but actually being able to make observations about these creatures or phenomena. That bit is what we've been trying to help them bridge; articulating all their weird, random bits of information into coherent observations.

The wonderful thing about science is that it's all around, especially now as they tackle living things as a topic. I discovered one morning after dropping the twins off that one of their schools faced a bank of wild vegetation. Peering at the various plants and trees by the pathway, I noticed with a great amount of glee, an army of different sorts of trees and shrubs as well as leaves housing spiders and leaves folded downwards because of sacs of spider eggs. Time to bring them on a nature ramble.

That's when I decided that I was going to make their textbook real to them. Part of what the twins are doing is to identify the different characteristics of leaves. Once again, it's about observation. So, armed with the scissors from my very guniang Swiss Knife and a plastic bag that Muffin had carelessly tossed at the back of the car, I braved commando mosquitoes and started clipping off different leaves.

So yesterday's revision for next week's Science test was to set up their leaf scrap book, identify and list the various characteristics of each of the leaves after pasting them in. Of course from the academic point of view, it's a small section of what they need to know but it was fun and they'll remember it past their use of the scrap book.



Another part of the topic required them to learn the functions of the different parts of the plant. They could learn it by heart or they could see it. I opted for them to see how plants and their system for transporting water worked. To do this, all that was necessary was food colouring, big jars and leaves of Chinese cabbage.

They marvelled at how quickly the water was transported to the tips of the leaves, how the tips of the leaves coloured first and how extensively the network of veins was. And the added bonus was that it was very very pretty. 

If these questions were asked next week, it would be a bonus. If they didn't, at least they'd know how to make very pretty coloured flowers next time. 

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Home Made Play #4: Milk Magic

Nope, this isn't a breast feeding post.

It's about cool science. You get to dot milk with pretty colours and then  get the coloured swirls to move around as if they had a life of their own.

All 3 love this experiment though it requires a bit of dexterity and not dunking the entire cotton bud in.

It eventually looks the colour of strawberry, orange or weird green melon milk when they are done with it. But it's cool nonetheless.

All it requires is
a. Food colouring
b. Detergent
c. Full fat milk (The more milk fat there is, the more dispersal effect there will be)
d. Cotton buds

What happens in this 'experiment' is that milk has 'surface tension' that is created by the cohesive forces of milk molecules. Liquid colouring, being less dense than milk stays on the surface, most of the time in the vicinity of where it was dripped. Detergent weakens said surface tension. So when the detergent is dipped onto the colour droplet, it breaks down the fat in the milk and the tension outside of the detergent drop pulls the colouring outwards, forming a colour rim. (See Muffin's right corner picture)

The first time Muffin did it, he simply could not follow the instructions of 'touch the surface of the milk with the cotton bud' and 'use the other end of the cotton bud to dip detergent onto the coloured dot.' He spent his time turning the milk into coloured liquid.

The second time we did it, he was much more conscientious about following instructions. And managed to make some nice patterns before he started stirring it and declaring he was making 'orange' or 'strawberry' tea.

Evan was more fascinated with the effect the detergent caused (true to his curious and slightly more science inclined mind) and would repeat it again and again just to see the dispersal effect while Jordan , true to herself, wanted to make complicated swirls before she dispersed it. She saw that as a means of clearing her pattern so that she could start with a relatively clean milk surface again.

It's not something that will occupy them the whole day but it did keep them quiet for a good while and doesn't cost much to create (I bought home brand milk and used whatever colouring we had left from the cloud dough session) and the added bonus of it being pretty at the same time.

There's more of an explanation here if needed. 

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Home made play #2: Cloud dough

For7 year olds, regular dough doesn't cut it. They'll play with it for a while but then meh...

Evan also loves creating reactions. I think it began when we blew up Coca Cola in the backyard. He loves the little experiment kits that create lots of foaming and possibly heat or extreme cold as well.

So I decided to make 'cloud dough'. Cloud dough has the consistency of wet sand. It clumps together quite nicely but at the same time, it falls apart with just a little bit of pressure. But the best part about this recipe is that we can cause it to bubble and foam dramatically with the addition of vinegar.

It's basically
1. 1 part of flour to 1 part of baking soda. (I went by cups- 1 cup to 1 cup)
2. 1/4 cup of oil.
3. Food colouring to make it pretty.
And combine.

And to make it bubble and boil,
1. Vinegar (as much or as little as you can spare)
2. Syringes and droppers.

I also gave them kitchen toys to play with. Muffin was intent on making cup cakes. The twins were trying to figure out how much 'sand'/ 'dough' they could stuff into the containers. And at 7, a large part of their play involved toilet humour which I shall not repeat here.

Eventually, I took out the vinegar and after explaining to them how the vinegar who react to the baking soda, I set them free. First, they started small. They dripped drops of vinegar into segments of cloud dough and it started to foam. Eventually, we got to the point where entire bowls of vinegar were dumped into the dough and it erupted, foamed, bubbled and hissed with a life of its own. They played with the cold sludge after that and created real muck out of it.

Like the dough and vinegar mixture, they erupted into peels of excited laughter which brought about the kids on the level. By this point, I  pretty much left them to their own screamy devices and retreated into the house to read a book.

My only problem with this is that the batch you make pretty much goes out with the trash that very night. It's a non-renewable play thing. 

Evan has asked me to do it again. I told him we would but he had to go with me to buy more bicarb.

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Home made play #1 : Frozen hands

I like making play stuff for JED. It's how I play with them and I enjoy nothing more than to be able to do this. Perhaps, it's got to do with the memories of my own childhood where my mom would always come up with simple and fun ways for me to play. It could have been filling a plastic bag full of water and poking holes in it. Or it could have been bringing home bags of sand from the beach and building a sandbox for me to play in.

So, from the point that they were cognizant enough to muck around, I started making things that they could muck about with. Most of the time, there wasn't much intent in it except to watch them have fun. And among other things, this blog seems to be a record of many of those times.

Anyway, I haven't done it in a while and JED seem to be growing up so quickly so I thought I'd do a series of home made play starting with their individual and recent favourites.

As with most girls her age, Jordan loves Frozen. Thankfully we are seeing the tail end of it. Even then she is fascinated with all things ice and blue.

So during a particularly hot spate, which we have been having quite a bit of, I decided to make her a couple of ice hands to play with.

All that was necessary
1. A few latex gloves
2. Some water to fill up the gloves (if you want to be adventurous, it could be coloured water)
3. For fun, drop beads and what nots into it so that the kids get an extra kick out of it.
4. Salt, warm water, cold water (and other variables of melting agents).
5. Syringes, teaspoons and little pipettes to dribble water onto the ice hands.
6. A freezer to dump them in for a couple of hours (Lay them on flat surfaces with fingers spread out so that they freeze properly)

The challenge was to strip the glove without breaking the fingers. We weren't too successful with that so Elsa came away with many broken fingers. It seemed to bring out the macabre in JED; they insisted on breaking more fingers.

They figured out that with the salt, the fingers and hands melted quicker but not as quick warm water did and so on and so forth.

By the end of it, all of JED had fingers that were frozen blue, especially Jordan who has as much cold tolerance as an insect. But they wanted to play with more ice hands. So I have an emergency stash of ice hands in my freezer for days that they are upset or have fallen down or are running a fever and need so chill respite.

But woe is he who opens my freezer and is met by a shelf of frozen hands. A friend did and asked "Who froze Elsa?"
 

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Outdoor classroom

It's nearing the end of term and I'm exhausted and ennui is my default state of being. Anything more than that requires too much effort. Thankfully, JED are too young to articulate that even though I think they feel a little bit of it as well. They've been hard at work every day in school rehearsing for their graduation concert.

So, this morning, I decided it was time to cut everyone some slack, myself included. Instead of the regular table work that we do in the mornings, I take them out to a little mound of a hilltop that is across the road from my bedroom and kitchen window. No one really goes there except for elderly people taking walks round a 50m track. But surrounding it are trees on slopes of grass.

I tell the twins we are doing work outside. They stare at me in disbelief. They wonder why I am not carting their books and furniture out. All I do is send them out slathered with insect repellant holding on to a clipboard and a pencil (no eraser even!).

We make it up as we go along. And they are most excited. I set them tasks.

1. Counting steps. They count the stairs they have to go up. The answers aren't the same. They run up and down, counting, till they can agree on the number. It's 33, they tell me, panting.

 
2. Write down ten things that they see. They have to look all around and find ten things. Instead of just standing still in one spot and looking round, I push them onto the grass slopes and tell them to find a spot, squat down and write down what they see. Jordan doesn't just write down the things she sees, she draws them, in exact numbers. Evan illustrates it by drawing a symbol of it beside the word.  The most interesting things on their list? Roots that look like vines (Evan). A Squirrel (Jordan).

3. Pick up sticks; while the twins are busy scavenging around for things to list, I ask Muffin to pick up 5 sticks. When he does so, I ask him to arrange it from longest to shortest.

The twins see him do that and want to pick up sticks too. I make it a bit more challenging for them. I tell them that between the two of them, they have to find forty sticks of varying lengths and thicknesses and line them up from the longest to the shortest sticks. I leave it to them how they will divide out the labour between them. Muffin joins in and eventually they arrange them in descending order.

4. Build a road.
With the forty sticks they had painstakingly arranged, the next thing I ask them to do is to line them in a way that will create a road across the ground. It doesn't have to be straight but it has to be a continuous path. They declare their road a curly-wurly one. Obviously, the forty sticks weren't enough and they had to scavenge for more. It eventually took them 61 sticks to build their road. Muffin contributed the mother of all sticks.

5. A Root walk.
When all is done, I tell them they can't use the stairs to go back down. Evan proposes we walk on the tree roots, all the way down. The trees surrounding us were tall, old ones and their roots snaked all over the ground. Evan states that there are crocodiles in the water and the only way to get to safety is to follow a root path all the way down to the bottom. It requires them to map out which root they were going to hop onto next.

Five tasks that take about an hour for them to complete. Along the way, they point out to me moss on trees, a woodlouse and a tiny snail shell. I get them to touch the moss on the tree roots and we observe a squirrel scampering up and down a tree. They are sweaty and their hands incredibly grubby from dealing with sticks and poking around moss. We get home with enough time to wash up, have a drink and put on socks and shoes before heading back down to catch the bus. They are chuffed announcing to all and sundry that they didn't do work and they spent the morning picking up sticks.

Fooled them.

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Mom the Research Coordinator

It was suggested that I do a series on the roles of the moms. We've seen all the cliche wall papers on Facebook about what a is, apart from just being the person who has given birth to the child.

And we also know this from the fact that our kids begin most sentences with "Mommy, can you __________ (insert action).

So, this shall be my next series.

Last week, it occurred to me that I was Evan's research coordinator. Evan loves science experiments (ex-P-riments, in his words). The problem is that he's still a little bit young to figure out the stuff needed to set up the experiments. Usually, he pulls out his Big Book of Science Experiments and randomly points to something that has sparked off his interest. We've done the Coke-Mentos experiments, water experiments, shaving foam ones as well and others that I cannot remember. His idea of my spending time with him is to do experiments with him. And we did just that, this time with inspiration from Gingerbread Mum's Milk Magic.

It had to be full fat milk. The fat globules in the milk were key to the experiment. What we did was to add food colouring into it first. The food colouring stays as a darkened dot in the milk, though the colour does slowly bleed out a little and swirls around prettily. It reminded me of the chromatography we used to do in the chem lab. That, in itself got lots of "WOW!" and "AWESOME!" (I hate it when everything is "AWESOME!" but that is another post altogether) but introduce a drop of soap detergent by way of a q-tip and colour explosions begin to occur.

So apparently detergent weakens the bonds between the fat and the proteins in the milk and the fat and soap apparently do some sort of fat bumping gymnastics which causes the colours to bump around, much to the amazement of the twins. Muffin just liked swirling the colours around but Evan and Jordan wanted to know what caused it and they kept trying to figure it out for themselves, trying it in water instead of milk, more soap, less soap, changing it to new milk claiming their swamp coloured milk had too much soap in it.

When we explained it to Evan, he could rattle it off. How much of it he understood of it, I really don't know but I do love that he's such a science geek and finding new experiments for him to do. We're going to try the erupting volcano one next but he doesn't know it yet.

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Sunday science experiments

We discovered a whole new way of playing with the kids. We have to credit Evan's dogged insistence that we do this experiment. He has recently got it into his head that he wants to become a scientist and loves the idea that scientists spend all their time doing experiments. And once, in a supermarket, he picked up a Coca Cola can and shook it. That elicited great chiding from both Packrat and myself with the warning that the can would explode.

That got him hooked. He wanted to see the Coke can explode. I did a mini version of it with them one rainy day with some Mentos sweets. He didn't stop talking about it and in his own way, he was always investigating and testing his hypothesis (that Coca Cola was the most explosive drink ever), asking us, every time he saw a canned drink on a billboard whether it was more or less explosive than the Coca Cola we fizzed and foamed.

So Packrat and I promised the experiment on a grand scale. It required a trip to the supermarket, the stationery store and drawing up some data record sheets. All this while, the boy couldn't sit still and his infection bled off on his not so investigative sister. 

By the time we were ready, we had
1. 5 bottles of drink of varying fizziness.
a. Coca Cola (Original)
b. Sprite
c. 100 Plus (the boy was most displeased because he wanted H20)
d. A&W Root Beer
e. Fanta Grape.
2. 3 tubes of Mentos minus one because Mommy was hungry.
3. Data sheets which required them to
a. Write down the name of the drink bottle
b. Circle 1-5 to measure how much it exploded (1 being small explosion and 5 was volcanic)
c. State at the bottom after everything was done which one had the biggest explosion.
d. State at the bottom after everything was done which one had the smallest explosion.

We did it on Sunday, with JED's cousins so 5 kids, each got to pick a drink bottle and Packrat would drop 3 mints into the bottle.   

Chief Researcher and Assistant

Our hypothesis was that Coke would fizz and explode the most with 100 Plus being the most pathetic. We were right. But we were surprised by the in between results, that Sprite gave Coke a really good fight and Fanta and Root Beer were a notch less fizzy than the leaders but way more than the paltry 100 Plus.

Evidence

The children loved it, were very earnest about collecting data although Evan had preconceived notions about the number he wanted to allocate the drink regardless of how much it fizzed. That, we will need to convince him to shrug off before he becomes a real scientist.

What surprised us was Jordan. While she was muted in her excitement, she was very conscientious about recording her data and making sure that it tallied with what she saw.

Making observations

Data collection

Even the little ones had fun. The little cousin called it volcano explosions and Muffin kept shouting every time the bottle foamed and clapping his hands with glee. We think this might become a regular feature. The twins haven't talked about it and Evan has gone on to imagine his next experiment. And for the times when we can't figure out what to do, I'm ordering this book!

The helpers in the house were the only ones who were tsk-ing away, not so much because we made a mess; we made the children flush out the garden patch that got over the overflow. It was more that we were wasting precious drinks that they loved. So they took the remaining half bottles, even if it tasted a little bit minty and we gave them the remainder mints to mollify them!


Technorati Tags: pre-schoolers, Learning through play, Learning science

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