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!