Category: Science

Honoring the Mars Exploration Team and How You Personally Have Benefited from the Space Program 0

Honoring the Mars Exploration Team and How You Personally Have Benefited from the Space Program

Later today, the mission team for NASA’s long-lived Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity will be awarded the Haley Space Flight Award.  Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager,  John Callas,  will accept the award on behalf of  the team. Previous recipients of this prestigious award have included Alan B. Shepard, John Glenn, Thomas Stafford, Robert Crippen, Kathryn Sullivan and the crew of space shuttle mission STS-125, which flew in 2009 on the last shuttle...

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Plant Activities: Symmetry, Vascular-NonVascular Plants

In our discussions about plants, the book pointed out that many leaves are symmetrical. We talked quite a bit about what symmetry is. First we took turns laying items out on a paper to make both sides symmetrical: Then we brought out paint and the girls made a number of symmetrical paintings. ED took a lot of care making small dots and pressing the paper down, then making more dots...

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Preschool Science: Plants

After doing a couple projects that talked about things that live above ground and below ground, we then delved a bit more into plants. We did a cute sorting project from Kidssoup (a paid membership website) which shows where certain fruits and vegetables grow: ED also sorted a whole series of cards into fruit and vegetable baskets. I’m not sure where I got these cards, but I made a set...

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Preschool Science: Above-Below Ground

In ED’s preschool science we are still talking about plants and animals. On this day we talked about animals and plant parts that live above or below the ground. We talked about how some animals like the grub or the cicada live part of their life under the ground, then live another stage above the ground. Some animals shelter under the ground when it is cold (like frogs and turtles)....

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Preschool Science: Living, Nonliving

We’ve been having a discussion of what makes something living. Living things eat drink (need water) breathe grow reproduce We’ve been observing mealworms for the past couple weeks.  We saw evidence of their growth because they shed their exoskeleton. Yesterday we noticed they had transformed completely into darkling beetles! We’ve been keeping track of the growth of three sunflower plants out in the garden. Our sunflowers have grown an inch...

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Ten Books My 4 and 6 Year Old Love

It’s been a while since I talked about the books we’re reading.  We have lots of books around, plus we check out lots of books from our local library (50+ at a time!). I thought I’d highlight ten books that have been on the repeated request list. While we’ve read other books in the past couple of weeks, these are the books that I have read again and again (and...

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A Great Science Activity: Working with Mealworms

The science curriculum I’m using this year suggests letting the kids observe and work with mealworms. This is part of our discussion of what makes something living or not living.  I purchased some from a local pet shop and came up with a few activities for the kids to do as they observe and learn about their mealworms. Before I even uttered a word, I simply handed the kids their...

Creepy Concoctions 0

Creepy Concoctions

We had some free-form science play for a couple of days earlier in the week. The kids made a number of slime concoctions using various recipes from a science experiment book LD has. I’m not quite sure what the kids learned from this, but LD made a bit of “dragon’s blood” yesterday by mixing various ingredients (corn syrup, peanut butter, dish liquid soap, dye, etc.).  Maybe a bit about viscosity?!...

Feathered Dinosaurs 2

Feathered Dinosaurs

This might be of interest to the dinosaur-loving tots (and parents!) out there. This news from last month passed me by until a couple of days ago. Did you hear that a new species of feathered dinosaur was discovered in Bavaria, in Southern Germany? The fossil of a Sciurumimus albersdoerferi, a carnivorous dinosaur that lived about 150 million years ago in the late Jurassic period shows the first evidence of feathered theropod dinosaurs that are...

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5 Senses: Matching Scents Activity

On Friday we revisited an activity that we’ve done a number of times before, making pairs of scents and trying to find the match. To set up for this activity, I taped a piece of paper with matching symbols on sets of 2 Q-tips. Then I dipped the Q-tips into various liquids (vinegar, vanilla, fish sauce, almond extract, and lemon juice).  You can also do this with a cotton ball...

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Five Senses: Sound Bingo

ED is doing a brief unit on the 5 senses. I’ll talk a little more about our general activities below, but first I wanted to share this wonderful sound game we played! One of the activities we did together this week was called Sound Bingo.  I downloaded the sound files such as a baby, guitar, monkey, fireworks, scissors (41 sounds in all) onto my laptop and printed out bingo cards...

Learn All About Mars, “Curiosity” is Landing Soon! 0

Learn All About Mars, “Curiosity” is Landing Soon!

We have started getting excited about the Mars Space Laboratory, Curiosity which has been enroute to Mars for about eight months now.  We started doing some activities to learn about Mars. I wanted to post this early enough that you could get your child excited about the upcoming landing too. It’s a little less than two weeks away! The new Mars Rover, a space laboratory called Curiosity is set to...

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Writing Secret Messages

I meant to talk about this a couple of days ago right after the lemon soda post, but life’s been full and fun and I didn’t get around to it.  This is another great activity to do with ingredients I’m sure you have in your kitchen. We did this a while ago, but if the weather’s hot, your kids might enjoy being spies for the afternoon! We used two different...

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Garden Science

Who knew that our garden flowers could be so fascinating?! We have hydrangeas and only just now learned why they have different colors. They are affected by the pH of the soil and by the amount of sunlight they receive. A blue hydrangea means that there is aluminum in the soil. The flowers turn blue in highly acidic soil. A pink hydrangea means that the pH of the soil is...