Home Experiments for the Homeschooling Mom
Here's a lovely experiment I tried today:
Try to pull a large, skinny, long box out of a larger, longer, skinny box, filled with polish peanuts. Make sure it draws the attention of your two youngest helpers. Spill half the polish peanuts on the wooden front hall floor. The two little helpers will jump in to scatter and crush. Watch the static electricity cause them to float all kinds of weird places and coat the children. Then leave, just for a moment, to write an email about the invoice. Return to find that the youngest has thrown his new R2D2 into the still mostly-full box of peanuts. Notice that R2D2 is about the same size and shape and color as the polish peanuts. Resort to dumping the whole box to find R2. Then try to put them all back. With the help of the preschooler and toddler. Eventually try to spray them down with water, (which you notice is, for some reason, scented with just a little lavender essential oil) just a bit, to contain static, and crawl around on the wet, staticky, peanut-coated floor for what seems like days, desperately trying to scoop them up and get them back in the box as they float eerily the other direction, repelled by the incarceration of their brothers. This is particularly interesting at 8+ months pregnant. Watch as the preschooler and toddler scatter them faster than you can scoop. Eventually somehow get most of them picked up and have the bright idea to vacuum up the last ones. Remind yourself that your idiotic 'bagless' vacuum has a small dust tank, and plan to stop often. Stop often but not often enough, to discover that instead of filling the small dust tank, the vacuum has choked on the larger ones and filled up the mysterious semi-sealed top chamber. Give up and leave a choked vacuum and a hallway full of peanut-bits and write whiney emails, posts, and blogs. You can increase the educationality of this experiment by playing classic(al) music while doing it, such as Weird Al's "Yoda" set (by the preschooler) on LOUD and repeat-forever.
Make sure you journal what you learn from this ... once you figure it out.
if you ever figure it out.
Try to pull a large, skinny, long box out of a larger, longer, skinny box, filled with polish peanuts. Make sure it draws the attention of your two youngest helpers. Spill half the polish peanuts on the wooden front hall floor. The two little helpers will jump in to scatter and crush. Watch the static electricity cause them to float all kinds of weird places and coat the children. Then leave, just for a moment, to write an email about the invoice. Return to find that the youngest has thrown his new R2D2 into the still mostly-full box of peanuts. Notice that R2D2 is about the same size and shape and color as the polish peanuts. Resort to dumping the whole box to find R2. Then try to put them all back. With the help of the preschooler and toddler. Eventually try to spray them down with water, (which you notice is, for some reason, scented with just a little lavender essential oil) just a bit, to contain static, and crawl around on the wet, staticky, peanut-coated floor for what seems like days, desperately trying to scoop them up and get them back in the box as they float eerily the other direction, repelled by the incarceration of their brothers. This is particularly interesting at 8+ months pregnant. Watch as the preschooler and toddler scatter them faster than you can scoop. Eventually somehow get most of them picked up and have the bright idea to vacuum up the last ones. Remind yourself that your idiotic 'bagless' vacuum has a small dust tank, and plan to stop often. Stop often but not often enough, to discover that instead of filling the small dust tank, the vacuum has choked on the larger ones and filled up the mysterious semi-sealed top chamber. Give up and leave a choked vacuum and a hallway full of peanut-bits and write whiney emails, posts, and blogs. You can increase the educationality of this experiment by playing classic(al) music while doing it, such as Weird Al's "Yoda" set (by the preschooler) on LOUD and repeat-forever.
Make sure you journal what you learn from this ... once you figure it out.
if you ever figure it out.
Posted: Fri - April 15, 2005 at 05:02 PM
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Published On: May 21, 2005 02:30 PM
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Published On: May 21, 2005 02:30 PM