Learning the Different Types of Clouds
Sunday, May 29, 2016
Anyway, the first book he read was the Clouds Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science 1 (AmazonUS) (Book Depository). This is by far the best book I’ve encountered that illustrated the different types of clouds in a simple way, and the explanations are so basic and easy to grasp for kids. So after reading the book, we sat down the next day and worked on some hands-on activities for retention.
Teeth Activity for Toddlers! (29 Months Old)
Thursday, May 5, 2016
Earth and Land Theme: Earth Prints
Saturday, April 16, 2016
Vito is 29 months old.
Earth Day is coming! We’re having a week of Earth/Land Themed activities and I just have a lot of inspirations from here and can’t wait to try them! Yesterday we made Earth prints. I decided to this one first as its very easy to recreate and manageable when you’re doing it with two kids!
How to Study The Story of the Universe and The Origin of Life
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
Exploring the Bucket Balance
Saturday, March 5, 2016
I have this bucket balance years ago and was mostly used by Mavi (Measuring Mass of an Object). He’s been using it to learn concepts like mass units and the concept of gravity. I’m so hesitant to let Vito use it for the obvious reason that at his age, he might break it or doesn’t know how to use it. But I was wrong! One day, I ran out of ideas for him so I bravely took our bucket balance and a bunch of Duplos for him to explore. Well, lo and behold! It was a total hit and I didn’t expect that he’ll enjoy using it!
So what did Vito exactly do with the balance and what are the things he discovered?
The Animal Kingdom Revisited
Saturday, February 27, 2016
No school for Mavi means brainstorming for future activities. He opened up lately that he wanted to study about animals again, so I took out our cards on The Animal Kingdom and checked what else we missed and haven’t explored yet. He reviewed the cards and sorted out the things that he wanted to learn this year. He picked arthropods, starfish and jellyfish! Yay, something new!
Learning the Parts of the Human Eye
Saturday, February 20, 2016
It’s Mavi’s midterm break and we decided to look into the parts of the human eye! We examined our model unit this morning which we bought last year from the local store. It’s so perfect and goes along so well with our Human Eye Nomenclature Cards and Booklet.
Science Experiments: What Makes Ice Melt Faster?
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Science Experiments: Making CRATERS
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Objective:
1. To identify the type of surface where craters are formed.
Materials Needed:
Procedure:
1. Lay the soft material in the ground like a newspaper a rug or a towel.
2. On top of it, lay the foil.
3. Stand at the edge of the foil and drop the ball or rock at the center of the foil. Note be decided to use the mini basketball because we realized that golf balls made a small impact.
4. Repeat this process on a hard floor. This time it was Vito’s turn to drop the ball.
5. Examine both pieces of the foil.
Findings:
The ball that was dropped in the foil on a soft surface (first image below) made a larger impression compared to the foil lying on a hard floor (second image). You can immediately see the impression when the ball is dropped in a soft surface! Look at them, they look like craters!
You can barely see an impression here, but Vito did dropped the ball a few times.
What happened?
The ball that was dropped in the softer surface sank, allowing more of the ball to be pressed against the foil. In effect, this created those “holes” in the foil. This is similar to the case of a meteorite (stone or metal in space) when striking a soft surface, it creates a larger imprint that are shaped like holes called craters. Craters are best formed when meteorites strikes soft, powdery surfaces like that in the moon! Why not check out real pictures of the surface of the moon from NASA!
You might also want to check our previous science experiments:
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Science Experiments: Twinkle Twinkle Stars and {Learn & Play Link Up}
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Objective: To simulate the twinkling of stars in sky.
Materials needed:
Procedure:
1. Crumple your square foil and place it on a table or on a floor.
2. Fill your clear bowl with tap water and place it on top of the crumpled foil.
3. Darken the room by turning off the lights. Hold the torch or flashlight above the bowl. Distance from the bowl is about 12 inches.
4. Observe the foil through the undisturbed water.
5. Now using your pencil, tap the surface of the water gently. Observe the foil through the moving water.
What happened?
The light rays reflecting from the foil when there was a movement in water appears to blur or twinkle.
Why?
The movement of the water causes the depth of the water to vary. The light rays twinkle because they bend or refract in different direction when it passed through the different depths of water.
This is similar to the light rays of the stars. They appear to be twinkling when you are observing from earth because they refract differently as the light rays move through the different thickness of air in the atmosphere. Scientifically, this twinkling phenomenon is called ‘scintillation’.
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Source: Janice VanCleave Astronomy
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Learning about Reptiles: Snakes
Monday, November 2, 2015
If you are in the UK or Ireland, you must have heard of Steve Backshall and his animal shows like the Deadly 60. Mavi is obsessed with Steve, due to his witty and pleasant hosting of the show. You can learn about it here. Now, going back, he’s been featuring reptiles lately, mostly how dinosaurs evolved into crocodiles, birds, snakes etc.
What are Reptiles? We learned from our previous study of the Vertebrate animals that REPTILES have a covering of bony plates or scales. They vary in sizes and shapes and include forms like snakes, alligators, crocodiles, turtles and lizards. Reptiles make their homes in great variety of places .
In this post, I will be focusing on snakes, as Mavi and I had a brief discussion about them a few days ago. This is the book we’ve got of Steve Backshall and we used it as a reference. We had a few snake figures from Safari Ltd Reptiles TOOB .
Books. These are the books of Steve Backshall we borrowed from the library. Youcan check them out here:Steve Backshall's Deadly 60
Characteristics of Snakes (things we learned):
Life Cycle of a Snake
This life cycle material is for FREE and you can download it from my SCIENCE PRINTABLE PAGE.
So we looked into the process of how snakes give birth. We also learned that NOT ALL SNAKES GIVE BIRTH BY PRODUCING EGGS. ANACONDAs give birth to their young!
Snakes Around the World
So I gathered a list of snakes and we looked at them over the internet. I didn’t produce any printable file as the images are all copyrighted. But I provided the link below on where you can find them, and see how they look like or learn about their habitats.
- Ribbon Snake [wiki]
- Coral Snake [wiki]
- Rubber Boa [link]
- Rough Green Snake [link]
- Timber Rattler [link]
- Desert Gopher Snake [link]
- Ring Necked Snake [link]
- Sidewinder or Horned Rattlesnake [link]
- Pike Headed Tree Snake [link]
- Pilot Black Snake [link]
- Copperhead Snake [link]
- Southern Hognose Snake [link]
- California Lyre Snake [link]
- Water Moccasin [link]
- Gray Pilot Snake [link]
You might also be interested in these amazing Snake Units:
Investigating Animal Tracks and {Learn & Play Link Up}
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
** contains affiliated links **
We are continuing on our study of animal identification and learning more about their characteristics. After watching Deadly 60 series of Steve Backshall, we discovered that you can also identify animals by the tracks they make! So we used our favourite Schleich animal figures to test this. We randomly dipped the animals in the black paint and freely made tracks. Vito’s helping as well!
The tracks and trails an animal leaves can tell us the type of animals it is and whether it was walking or running, and you can also tell if it was by itself or with a group of other animals.
Footprints of animals are very tricky to identify unlike that of humans! But by thorough investigation, you can tell if the animal is hoofed or with paws or toes. To learn about the footprints of these animals, one must have a proper observation for these unique characteristics.
Animal tracks to note:
- Did the animals walk on 2 or 4 feet?
- Does the animal left a large or small track?
- Was it walking or running?
- Was it just one animal or followed by another?
Using our printable and the actual tracks, Mavi grouped the animals according to the characteristics of their footprints:
- Raccoon and bear have 4 toes front and 5 toes rear, they have claws.
- Dog, fox and wolf have 4 toes front, 5 toes rear and produces an egg shaped track
- Lion, lynx produces a round track with claws, 4 toes front and 5 toes rear
- Deer, elk have heart shaped tracks and has 4 toes front and 5 toes rear
And the highlight of this lesson is for them to see how their footprints look like!
Materials Used:
Thank you for taking time to read this post! You might as well visit our Zoo Animal Tracks post for another activity that involves playdough. It’s a not as messy as black paint
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Science Experiments: Solubility of Different Substances
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Objectives:
- Discovering which substance dissolves in water
- Why the said substance dissolves faster in water
Materials needed:
- salt, sugar, flour, chalk powder
- 4 bottles of water
- teaspoon
- stirrer
Procedure:
Findings:
- Salt and sugar easily dissolved in water after stirring. They have grainy texture and are crystalline thus making it more soluble in water.
- Flour and chalk powder partially dissolved, most of the powdered portion resided at the bottom of the bottles. They have powdery and dry texture, thus making it hard to dissolve in water.
Now, for older children who can grasp complex explanation… I prepared a visual and hands-on demonstration for Mavi to understand how the substance are more soluble, partially soluble and insoluble. Make sure though that when you try to discuss this with your kids, he/she is already familiar with the elements in the periodic table and can understand what “attraction” means, similar to the concept of magnetism. The link I provided is the one where I introduced the Periodic Table to Mavi in a fun and interesting way.
Anyway, here’s how the chemicals of the substance interact to water when mixed.
SOLUBLE SUBSTANCE
I used plasticine to demonstrate the chemical composition of salt and water to Mavi.
Salt is composed of: sodium (Na+) in green and chloride (Cl-) in purple.
Water is made up of H2O, hydrogen (H+) in white and oxygen (O-) in red.
When mixed with water, the salt molecules are easily “attracted” to the water molecules. It’s like the positive and negative attraction in magnetism (polarity). Thus, sodium (Na+) is attracted to oxygen (O-), while chloride (Cl-) is heavily attracted to the two positively charged hydrogen (H+).
Because of the strong attraction between molecules in the two substances, salt is easily dissolved in water.
PARTIALLY SOLUBLE
For partially soluble substances, the molecules that made up the flour or chalk have weak attractions with the molecules of the water. Thus some have dissolved but most of it didn’t and the result are the residues found at the bottom of the bottles.
INSOLUBLE SUBSTANCE
For insoluble substances (don’t dissolve in water) like oil, the molecular contents are NOT attracted to water. This means they do not mix with water and if you combine them, you will definitely see the separation.
Though some advanced students can explain that this is because oil is a non-polar substance and can only be dissolved with another non-polar substance, the way I explained it to Mavi is that oil molecules are just so heavy that water molecules can’t “bond” with it.
This was a fantastic activity for both Mavi and I. More experiments coming up!
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