Bean Plant Experiment Finale

What did we learn? Sun and water give the best affect, of course. We also saw that water and sun are not equally important to plants. A plant can still grow and produce beans without water, albeit stunted. No sun and  the bean plant is doomed to death. Plants 1 and 2 both have bean pods growing now.

Ping Pong Science

We did a fun and easy experiment this week. Put a small dent in a ping pong ball. Fill a cup with hot (but not too hot) water. Put in the ball and cover. The air inside the ball warms up and expands, pushing out the dent.

Bean Growth

Now that it is spring, we have finally begun learning about seeds. This is happening inside of course since we have a high risk of snow here in Minnesota.

Here are our beans (3) the day we planted them. The baby food jar has about an inch of water (do not allow them to be completely submerged as it stunts the growth) and the center is full of paper towel.

This is at 1 week. The leaves were straight up in the air the next day and there are lots of  roots.

This is just 2 weeks and 2 days. We transferred them to dirt and now the experimentation can begin.

If we go from left to right on the plants above, the first will get sun and light, the second only sun, and the third only water. We are also charting their growth. The experiment is supposed to go 1 month, so we will see how they fare till then.

Floating Peanuts

Water + baking soda + vinegar + Peanuts = Floating
Yeah, so what's happening? Well, peanuts do not normally float, let me get another cup with just water in it.  Okay, so sometimes they float and sometimes they sink. What are you trying to show me?

Here, let me add the baking soda and vinegar to the plain water with peanuts...
water + peanuts + baking soda + vinegar = Ohhhhhh!
Order matters...you learn something new every day, even when you are a mom!
This went with our Magic School Bus Gets Baked in a Cake book for science.

Fluffy Clouds

Made of soap? That's right! I have seen this activity floating around in the blogosphere and we just had to try it. Here is what you need: a bar of Ivory (that is the only kind that works, it has to be ivory) and a microwave. Some parchment paper underneath might be good too, it saves on clean up any way.

The bar goes in the microwave. Cook till you are ready to take it out.

The resulting cloud, let it cool before taking it out. There was still half a bar in the middle and so of course the man of the house had to see if it would go again. We ended up with 3 clouds this size after re cooking the cores.

Time to play with and break up the cloud into very tiny pieces. Add just enough water to make it moldable and fill some cookie cutters with the gloopy (clean) mess.

Tada! Super fun shaped soaps. They are very light and fluffy and made by Little Guy.