24 Days of Science!

[brighteyes]

I participated in the advent swap a few years ago and my daughter and I had such a blast opening up a little present every day (often a big present- Aurora totally spoiled us!) that I really wanted to do something like that for my daughter this year.  It's been a hard year with lots of challenges and changes for her and I wanted to make this holiday extra special.  But... she's getting "over ponies"    so doing a pony a day wouldn't work for her.  She's really interested in science so instead of a toy each day we will do an experiment or she will get something science related and also because the brain needs glucose a sweet treat.  So now we have:

24 Days of Science!

Today we have:
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And her lab notebook as well as gems and minerals to clean and identify:
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Inside the package we have a human anatomy and physiology card game and a big box of Swedish Fish.  On the back of the package I will write a topic for investigation and experimentation each day.  Today's topic is chemical reactions.  What are the chemical properties of vinegar and baking soda? What is their pH?  What happens when we mix them together etc....  and then research on her computer the chemical reactions that cause bubbling when vinegar and baking soda are mixed. 

To test pH we will make pH indicator using purple cabbage.  The cabbage is sliced and put in a pot with enough water to cover it and boiled until the water turns dark red-purple.  The liquid is strained and then can be added to other liquids.  Depending on the pH, the juice will turn pink, stay purple or turn green:
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Anyway, I'm pretty excited about 24 Days of Science and I hope that my daughter will enjoy it also.  If anyone has any cool science experiments that can be done at home or topics to explore or neat kits they've seen etc.. I'd love to hear about them!  Thanks in advance!!! 

[wiccanpony1]

This is a amazing idea:) x

[Artemesia's Garden]

I'm a science teacher, those activities sound brilliant and lovely! Starting with pH in the kitchen is so much fun. I'll try and dig some stuff out for you this week. I think you deserve some kind of brilliant Mum award have you got any resources you're already using? Your daughter's teacher might know some free online resources or 'extension' books that fit her syllabus that might give you some more ideas. How old is your daughter? Have fun!!

[lovesbabysquirmy]

Oooh so much fun!

[brighteyes]

I'm a science teacher, those activities sound brilliant and lovely! Starting with pH in the kitchen is so much fun. I'll try and dig some stuff out for you this week. I think you deserve some kind of brilliant Mum award have you got any resources you're already using? Your daughter's teacher might know some free online resources or 'extension' books that fit her syllabus that might give you some more ideas. How old is your daughter? Have fun!!

   Thanks-  I definitely like science too and am having a lot of fun planing this for her.  I'm a lab manager in the biology department at a local university and part of my job is to test and develop protocols for our biology lab courses.  BUT it's so much harder to think of things for my daughter because she is only 7.  She's very advanced for her age and is in the gifted math and reading programs at her school.  I hadn't thought to ask her teacher for resources- that is a great idea! 

We have a poster outlining the scientific method and I'm trying to get her familiar with it.  So each day we have a topic and a purpose and then research questions which lead to a hypothesis which can be evaluated via experimentation.

Apart from using the scientific method we would like to address: making measurements, recording observations, categorizing and analyzing data.  The most important thing though is that the activities be fun.  I don't want her to feel like this is work because she loves doing science now and I don't want to squish that.

The most difficult thing so far has been thinking of activities that we can do at home.  I can bring her to the lab on the weekends but during the week she's at school.  We do have an old microscope and a dissecting scope and a scale at home though.  I'm planning to take her to the lab on weekend and let her use the dis-articulated skeleton models to try and build a skeleton.  We will also go to The Science and Industry Museum and Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago on other weekends or over the holiday break.

So far we have:

Owl Pellet exploration to learn about food webs
Build Your Own Robot kit
Grow Crystals Kit
Instant Snow Kit
Microscope Slides
Fruit and Flower anatomy
Make Your Own Weather Station
Purifying Water Kit
Normal bacteria flora of skin and mouth (will do at lab)
Isolate DNA from fruit (could do this at home but may do at lab)
Looking at Fluorescent Rocks under UV lights (at lab)
Going to country and looking at stars (on a weekend)
Going to Kentland Crater and also looking for fossils http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentland_crater
Skeleton Detective (at lab)
Going to nature center at local county park (weekend)
Going to Lake Michigan and looking at succession
Science and Industry Museum
Field Museum

Any learning materials related to these would be really cool.  Midi really loves word searches so if anyone knows of any websites with free science word searches or coloring pages that would also be awesome!  Or if anyone knows of experiments that would be interesting to a 7 year old that would also be great.  I will e-mail her teacher and see if she has any ideas too.

[CottonTALE]

Here is a really cool class project I did when I was her age it's how to make homemade fizzy lemon soda. It shows what happens when you mix an acid with a base (plus it's fun to do edible science )

What you will need:
-Lemon
-Drinking glass
-Water
-1 teaspoon of baking soda
-Some sugar to make it sweet

Instructions:
1. Squeeze as much of the juice from the lemon as you can into the glass.
2. Pour in an equal amount of water as lemon juice.
3. Stir in the teaspoon of baking soda.
4. Give the mixture a taste and add in some sugar if you think it needs to be sweeter.

[Whippycorn]

Oh wow! This is an awesome idea! I want to have kids soon so I can do this sort of thing with them! 

[melodys_angel]

That's an awesome idea.  I would have loved that at her age

Have you thought about growing a geode? It will take more then 1 day but its easy and fun to see the crystals forming at the edge of the cup (or whatever container it is) as the water evaporates

[StoryDreamer]

I found some science puzzles and word searches

http://sciencespot.net/Pages/classpuzzle.html
http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/quizzes/wordsearches.html
http://freebies.about.com/od/free-printable-word-searches/tp/science-word-search.htm

[Artemesia's Garden]

Oh wow! This is an awesome idea! I want to have kids soon so I can do this sort of thing with them! 

I know what you mean! 

Those activities sound perfect. The Owl pellet prac is so exciting for them and can be a great intro to food chains and webs. The way energy moves through an ecosystem can be a real puzzler for kids so the sooner they get started the better 

My favorite area of Biology is plants. One thing I really like is how the equations for respiration and photosynthesis are opposite reactions. And plants are extra cool because they can do both! I have a good practical somewhere using mung beans which respire like crazy when they come into contact with water and start germinating. You might be able to set up a rig to show that the gas given off is carbon doixide which if bubbled through tap water should increase it's acidity. You might be able to test this with some of your cabbage indicator. Maybe your daughter could try testing how temperature affects the rate of reaction using a heat mat. Another nice one is to try putting pond weed or immobilised algae balls in water with hydrogencarbonate indicator and see what happens to a sample kept in the light (PSS and respiration will be occurring) and one kept in the dark (only respiration will be occurring). I'll try to find you some worksheets, or at least some more detail anyway.

It's great that you have a microscope! Another thing that might be good is looking at pond weed, pond shrimps and onion skins under the microscope to see cell looks like. I know the younger kids are the more they get a buzz out of seeing things through lenses that are normally too small to see. Maybe start with just a magnifying glass. You might be able to introduce some basic physics here, not really my thing so can't help you there =) Explain that all living organisms are made up of one or more cells that are too small to see with our eyes.

Then using various textbook and internet pictures show the main features and then she can build a model cell by sticking junk and bits of card, paper etc onto an A3 sheet of paper and labelling the basic parts - cell membrane, nucleus, mitochondria, ribosomes etc. She doesn't need to know what these things actually do for a while, just reveal the role of each one as you go through other areas of biology. For example, if you decide to go down the route mentioned above you could get her to do both an animal and plant cell and explain the differences e.g. that plant cells have cell walls and chloroplasts where PSS takes place. The sooner a kid starts to get a mental map of a cell the better IMHO. 

This is turning into an essay ha ha, will get back to you in the week 

[LeighAnnApanites]

This is such a fantastic idea! I'm totally ripping it off for my little one when she gets a bit older (she's 4).

Two things I did as science projects in elementary school:

1) yeast respiration - I googled and found a bunch of variations of this but I did it like this:

several clean, empty bottles
balloons
a variety of liquids (I used . . . I forget them all, but I remember orange juice, 'cause it worked the best, or you can make sugar water with different amounts of sugar)
yeast

measure an amount of liquid into each bottle, add yeast and place the balloon over the top of the bottle (you can secure the balloon to the bottle, but I didn't and had no disasters). You can measure the balloons daily and discover what liquid "feeds the yeast the best". It will take more than a day, I think I ran it for a week, but the results start showing up within a day.

2) This is quick and easy and lets you talk about measuring and molecules. Mixing alcohol and water results in a smaller volume of liquid than if you mathematically add the volumes you start with. This explains it pretty well. I used rubbing alcohol in my project. http://chemistry.about.com/od/lecturenotesl3/a/miscibility.htm

I would love to hear updates about how this goes! ('Cause you don't have enough to do, obviously. lol) Sounds like so much fun!

[Marigold]

This is the best idea ever (says the girl who wanted chem kits and microscopes for her gifts).  You are an awesome parent!   

[kaoskat]

What an awesome idea! I'm sure she'll love it!

[Thrice]

I used to work with kids and one of my favorite "experiments" was demonstrating freezing-point depression by making ice cream in a baggie:

http://chemistry.about.com/cs/howtos/a/aa020404a.htm

You can also demonstrate different colors in fire by burning different substances:

http://chemistry.about.com/od/coloredfire/tp/colored-fire-rainbow.htm

(....Just make sure you supervise this one. )

IF you could possibly get your hands on some phenolphthalein, it makes for an impressive acid/base indicator. Seriously, kids go googly eyed when they see all that pink just disappear. But I don't know exactly what your resources are:

http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/186indicator.html

Other fun things to do with acids/bases—cooking an egg with hydrochloric acid (might be too advanced because it is a very rough acid; DEFINITELY supervise):

http://www.carolina.com/teacher-resources/Interactive/cooking-eggs-with-chemicals/tr10689.tr

Glow-in-the-dark jello:

http://chemistry.about.com/od/glowinthedarkprojects/a/glowingjello.htm

Liquid density column:

http://www.hometrainingtools.com/liquid-density-project/a/1305/

And of course there's the classic potato clock:

http://chemistry.about.com/od/demonstrationsexperiments/ss/potatoclock.htm

Also, can I just mention how insanely cool it is that you and your daughter are doing science together? I love that so much.

[Shiromisa]

Ooooh! I was going to suggest the DNA, but I saw you already have it on the list. You can also do it with your own DNA for a personal touch! Take a swig of Gatorade, hold it in your mouth, and swish it around while you chew on the inside of your cheek, then use that in the experiment in place of the mashed fruit. You don't get as much DNA as you get from strawberries, but I thought it was super cool.