Surface tension

Yesterday we experimented with surface tension. I poured about a quarter inch of evaporated milk onto a pan and dripped some food color on it. Then the kiddos had a Dixie cup of dish soap and a toothpick. The process was to dip the toothpick in the soap, then into the center of a drop of color to see what happens. The soap changed the surface tension, and the colors swirled all around. At the end, we had a beautiful swirly pan of milk. They really enjoyed chasing the colors around the pan.

One of our other activities was "magic touch bags." These were a mixture of water, cornstarch and a bit of color. Once that was mixed, I added some oil. The cornstarch created a suspension with the water, but not the oil, so there was a blue, opaque liquid, and the oil. They would seem to come together, only to separate when left alone. They were a fun sensory experience when taped to a tray to use our fingers to draw lines and swirls on the bag.

We also had a lot of fun dancing ourselves silly :) The Cha Cha Slide is a favorite of our group, as well as some of Hap Palmer's active songs. Dancing is a great way to channel some excess energy. Our kiddos like it when the music is on my ipod, as that means they can jump around, because jumping makes our CD player skip and jump :)

Playdough

Today, the kids in my class (all three of them...it was a holiday, you know) played with the new batch of play dough I made on Friday (after the boy got sick on the batch I had made Thursday). This isn't your normal play dough...it is chunky. I found a reference to adding rock salt to the play dough in place of a portion of the table salt (theteachertom.com). I replaced about half.

We have been discussing what it is in the dough that makes it chucky. Many suggested ice. We discussed that ice would make the dough squishy as it melted (I need to get an ice cube and sacrifice a chunk of dough to observation). Crystals, beads, and diamonds were also suggested. Earlier today, we did some salted watercolor art (watercolor on fingerpaint paper, then sprinkle table and rock salt on it...see what happens). While we were looking at the play dough later, I asked if the chunks looked familiar. One of them realized that they looked like the rock salt. We will see if they remember that tomorrow :)

So we spent our time flattening, smooshing, squishing, cutting, pinching, and rolling our new chunky dough. In other words, we had fun.