We're Back!!

We took July off but I am so excited about our new August curriculum.  It has been unbearably hot here for the last several weeks, forcing us to spend large amounts of time in the air conditioning.  Thankfully, we have a super fun box of science experiments to keep us entertained and educated.

My girls love to pour and mix things so the Mixtures lesson was perfect for them.  We started with the sugar and oil experiment.  We don't drink bottled water so I didn't have any clear capped bottles and just made do with a couple of the glass spaghetti jars I have been saving.  It worked fine since I just had the two girls with me but I might not recommend using glass if you've got more than that just because of the possibility of breaking.  As it was, I ended up washing my floors three times during school because Littlest kept knocking over water.

We started with dissolving sugar into water.  Miss M noted the water was cloudy and then became clear as we swirled  and mixed it.  Then we added the oil to the other jar and watched it bead up and separate as we swirled and mixed it.  At this point, the sugar water got spilled all over the floor and we took a short break while I cleaned.

Our next experiment was making Jello.  My girls have been noticed steam in the past when I've used my Instant Pot (my favorite household gadget) so after I boiled the water we talked about how water changes state from liquid to gas when it gets hot (also used it as another opportunity to talk about kitchen safety) and from a liquid to a solid when it gets cold.  Would you believe that my girls have never actually had Jello before so this was all completely new to them? Their reaction to the jiggliness was totally adorable, although Littlest didn't actually like eating it.

Hands down their favorite activity was the color experimenting.  We read from the monthly storybook about Alfred Nobel first, then I filled the largest beaker with clear water and the other four with different colors (this is when the next two water accidents occurred.  My floor was very clean this day).  They each took turns add a little bit of their selected color and either predicting what would happen or naming the resulting color.  This will be one that we repeat (although maybe we will do it outside...).

Lastly we mixed paint colors on the included color mixing sheet.  I was a little worried about them mixing colors in the paint pots so we used two brushes for each primary color (so they each had their own because heaven forbid they have to share or wait for a color) and I had them put all the paint down for that particular color at one time.  They decided that their favorite mixed color was purple so I gave them each construction paper and let them paint away in purple until they decided they were done.

I'm really looking forward to taking some of these up to Washington next week and doing them with my six year old nephew.  This is a great box for keeping kids occupied the last few weeks before school starts up.