Jumbo Pippettes

The latest addition to our resources was some jumbo eyedroppers, large colourful pipettes that I thought would be great for the children's developing coordination and fine motor skills.

To gain the children's interest I provided some bicarbonate of soda with some drops of food colouring in them along with a pot of vinegar and they could not wait to get started. They were fascinated by the immediate reaction of the powder and began commenting on both the fizzing noise and the colours. 

The use of the muffin tray proved fascinating for the children also as they began to move their coloured liquids from one compartment to the other. 

These pipettes were a huge success with all ages and we shall definitely be looking out for more ways to make use of them soon.

Autumn Sink or Float

I love introducing simple science concepts and we have so many items from our autumn sensory bins lying around at the moment that I created a simple autumn themed sink or float experiment. I filled the tray with warm water given that it is October but it was still great to be able to be outside still. 

The children completely enjoyed taking it in turns to guess and then test whether the items they chose sunk or floated on the water. 

Once this part was over the children, rather predictably, took this opportunity for some water play. They enjoyed moving all of the items around in the water and then finally seeing which ones made the biggest splash. This ended in some pretty happy but rather wet children!

Frozen Hands

Whilst I loved the idea of the children experimenting with salt and ice, I have to confess that I found the idea of freezing hand shapes a little strange! I was proved wrong by the children who were absolutely fascinated by this activity. 

Using some latex gloves filled with water and a drop of food colouring I made some frozen hand shapes. We placed in the garden although there were a few loss digits as we removed the hands from the gloves! I then let the children loose with some salt. As the salt was added the hands gradually began to melt and the children's attention was held as the fingers got thinner. 

As the large quantity of ice meant that melting was a bit slow the children decided to speed up the process by adding some water to the salted hands. They loved trying to pour directly onto the hands and would not stop until every little bit of ice had melted! This was a great little science experiment for the children who learnt about melting and the effect that salt has upon ice.

Baking Powder and Vinegar Play

Today we introduced a little science experiment into our daily activities. I set a three year old the challenge of finding out what happens when you mix baking powder and vinegar.  He had great fun experimenting with this and definitely proved that science can be fun! 

I added some food colouring to clear vinegar and provided some pipettes and a baster to enable the vinegar to be added to the baking powder. Cautiously he began to add the vinegar using the smaller pipettes. Initially he was fascinated by the colour changes when the vinegar hit the powder but then he noticed the bubbles, putting his ear closer to listen to the resulting fizzing sound. 

To see the reaction better he began to use the bigger baster and this gave a much better bubbling reaction and produced some nice colourful results.