Summer Holiday Arts and Crafts

Well this is not science.

Here are the master pieces children made.

Julia's cleaning cat. It is made from cardboard.

Lucy's aquarium.  Tissue paper collage.  
 

Lucy, Julia and mum's pond life.  Paper collage

Lots of cards. They are made from scrape papers and papers from next catalog.

Two spoons, beautified by Lucy and Julia with fimo.

One Egyptian necklace from Lucy and mum. Long beads are made from paper and  two shoulder piece are made from fimo.

Some fimo beads and pendants. 

Wood pecker toy

This lovely woodpecker toy was made by Lucy.

String the elastic band through the straw, move the bird on top of the elastic band. while the bird fall down, it will move like woodpecker because the friction between the elastic band and straw

The template is on this wonderful website

http://sciencetoymaker.org/

Red cabbage PH indicator

When I made braised red cabbage for Christmas dinner one year, I noticed red cabbage cooked down to blue color, then turned to red again after put some balsamic vinegar and apples. 

Then we tried this experiment.

Materials:
Red cabbage, blocking paper.

First we cooked red cabbage in water.  This is the red cabbage soup, smelly and blue.
 

Now we are going to add different house hold things in . Let's see what happen.

From left to right: Bicarbonate of soda, Rice vinegar, Kids bady wash (with PH balanced), Lemon juice

Square beaker as the control

From left to right: with Bicarbonate of soda, rice vinegar, kids body wash, lemon juice in the soup

The bicarbonate of soda will dissolve as a alkaline solutions which makes the soup dark green.
The rice vinegar and lemon juice are acid, which make the soup pink or red.
The kids body wash with PH balanced on the bottle makes the blue soup turns to purple.

We made indicator paper strips as well. This is the photo girls are using the indicator paper.

The left over cabbage soup was not wasted. It became the main ingredient of witch portion.

Main ingredient: cabbage soup , Daddy's shaving foam. Mixing them up with extra care!

Home-made periscope

We made a periscope.  It is sadly broken after a few spy games. Here is a photo of the corpse.

Matrial:  two mirrors ( from Hobbycraft), cereal box, sellotape.  

Here is the illustrative diagram.

   

Home-made kaleidoscope

Do you have some cereal boxes, a transparent lid, sellotape, and a pair of scissors?

With three small mirrors, you can impress your children with their invaluable helping hands with this delightful kaleidoscope. 

We bought our three mirrors from Hobbycraft.

 Photo1: The ingredients

Photo2:  Use sellotape to secure three mirrors in triangular prism shape. Put some colorful small pieces like paper or beads in the lid, and cover it up with cling film, then secure the cling film on the lid with sellotape.

 Photo3 Use the cereal box to make a tube around the mirrors (the triangular prism). The blue dot is the reflection of small piece of paper.

Photo 4:  Put the tube with mirrors on top of the lid .Secure them together with sellotape.

Photo5 Cut a circle same size as the tube, and then make a small hole the middle. Secure it on the top of the tube. 

Photo 6  Then decorate with some pretty or cool paper. Here is our end result. 

 

Bread Yeast Experiment

This is  Lucy's idea.

She read it from those books I haven't got time to read, which I want to impress my children. :-)

We did some baking during the half term holiday. After everything went to the oven, before I had a chance to tidy up, Lucy started to open the draws in kitchen, asking for some sugar and a balloon.  

Then we did this.

We need some bread yeast, water bottle, sugar and a balloon.

We just added some water and yeast in the water bottle, then a tea spoon of sugar. We then stretched the balloon over the top of bottle.

Gave the bottle a good shake. See photo 1

The balloon was blowing up slowly.   Photo2  was taken after couple of hours.

Bread yeast consumes food like Starches (chain of sugars) from flour, or just simple sugar. The yeast enzymes break down sugars to grow and multiply, and produce carbon dioxide as a by-product.

I think it is the better way to show children how bread has holes inside. 

Some other ideas related of this experiment.

You can have two bottle of these, one with room temperature water, one with warm water. Which balloon blows up faster? :-)

Can we use fruit juice instead of sugar?What is going to happen?

We will do those experiments during the summer holiday. 

Have fun!

Owl pallet and the other stuffs 1

Lucy and me had fabulous time last Sunday in Cambridge science festival.
She thinks the most interesting activities are the antibody model and dissect of owl pallet.

Here is the antibody model she made.



Plastic plate resemble the cell membrane, which is the barriers on the outside of cells. They separate the insides of cells from the outside.

The blue pipe cleaner resemble the trans-membrane protein. They are molecules which go through cell membranes , so they can pass messages from the outside to the inside of cells.

The red pipe cleaner resemble the antibody. Antibodies are proteins which recognise and stick onto other molecules. Your body makes antibodies which help protect it against disease. Antibodies can be made and used as medicines.

How to do the model?

You need a plastic or paper plate, some different color pipe cleaners, some metal rings, a pair of magnetic jewelry clasps.

First poke some holes on the plate. Then use some pipe cleaner to thread through the holes.
Finally put the pair of magnetic clasp on the both side of one pipe cleaner, and twist the pipe cleaner to make a 8 shape.

How do seeds grow

Plants come from seeds. Each seed contains a tiny plant waiting for the right conditions to germinate, or start to grow.

There are three needs to be met: water, warmth, and a good location (soil) .

During the early stages of growth, the seedling relies on the food supplies stored in the seed until it is large enough for its own leaves to begin making food through photosynthesis.

The seedling's roots push down into the soil to anchor the new plant and to absorb water and minerals from the soil. The seedling's stem with new leaves pushes up toward the light.

The new plant need water, warmth, nutrients from the soil, and light to continue to grow.

Materials: Jam jar, napkins, seeds.

We used black bean, and mung bean.

First we put some napkins in the jars, then I pushed some beans down the napkin near the jar.

I left those two jars in a sunny spot.

Please remember to water everyday, keep the napkin wet.

Growing things

My daughters are always very excited by the sight of daffodils every March. They want to grow flowers , vegetables.

Lucy loves to grow plants and flowers that will attract wild life like bees and butterflies. Julia likes sunflowers best.


Lucy's wild life plants












Peas




















Sunflower

Non-newtonian fluid

This is a intimating or mysterious new word for kids.

We talked about gas, fluid, solid while we were making the non-newtonian fluid.

So what do we need? Just mix the water and corn flour, and food colouring! We made some pretty pink one.

Next question, how to play with the mixture?

You can punch it, poke it fast or poke it slowly, and shove your hand into the fluid slowly, and pull your hand out abruptly.

Or you can grab a handful, let it drip slowly between your fingers.

A non-newtonian fluid is a fluid whose stickiness ( proper word viscosity) is changeable based on applied force.

If you punch or poke abruptly into the mixture you made, the stress introduced by the incoming force causes it behaves like a solid. your hand or finger will not go through.

However if you poke it or shove your hand into the fluid slowly, the mixture will behave like a liquid.

Mixing colours

It's great fun for kids to mix paints to make new colors. You can use the primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) plus black and white to get all of the colors of the rainbow.

Sometimes kids will mix lots of colours together,they will end up having a big splodge brown on the paper.

We used food colouring, and kitchen roll to show how the colours merge together, the results are stunning.

You need :
1) Some kitchen roll paper sheets.
2) Three primary food colours diluted with some water.

Children( 3+) can do this by themselves. First they fold the kitchen paper serveral times, Second dip every side in the different food colour, then third unfold the paper, admiring the results!

The two primary colours will naturally merge together slowly to produce new colour.

Paper chromatography

纸层析

We need thick kitchen roll, felt pens, water.

Fold the kitchen roll using two layers.
Draw a dot on the paper.
We used brown and green color felt pens.




Using a knife to drop some water on the dots.









Wait for a few seconds, the result:
The green dot is seperated to blue and yellow
the brown color is separated into orange and yellow, green color.










Lucy is trying her experiment.