Ropes and Pulleys

For some reason, Joe and I were talking about ropes and pulleys. One thing lead to another, and soon we were in the back yard with some clothes line, pulleys, and a bucket. First we started with a bucket with a brick in it. Can you lift the brick? Yes. Can you lift two bricks... barely. How about three bricks? No way. Okay, over to the pulleys. A single pulley hung from a tree branch doesn't provide any mechanical advantage, but he had fun lifting the bucket up and down. Next, I added a second pulley for a 2:1 advantage and tied a loop in the rope so he could pull it across the lawn. Three bricks were now doable. Finally we, replaced the bricks with a particularly large zucchini. This proved to be way more fun.

There's no way that Joe, at three, is going to understand basic machines like this on an intellectual level. But if he develops some physical intuition by playing basic games like this, so much the better. Plus it's fun for everyone concerned.

Pennies in Water



This was another simple activity that Joey really enjoyed. I filled a cup about as full as I could, and then he put pennies in until it began to overflow. He guessed it would take five pennies to make it overflow.

    

It took many more than five pennies!

  

Finally overflowing.

 

Lots of fun! And today he learned a new word - meniscus.




Water Spurts

I got the idea for this activity from "Science Play!" by Jill Frankel Hauser, though I have also seen it in other science for kids type books. The book has you using a large plastic bottle (like a 2 liter soda bottle), but I only had some plastic cups on hand. The idea is to put three vertical holes in the bottle, fill it with water, and watch as the jets of water spurt out to different distances. The cup of water didn't work as well in terms of different distances, but my son poured water in and watch it spurt out over and over for about 30 minutes.



I used a plastic cup, awl, and a baking pan to contain the water spurts.

  

The book says to heat a nail over a candle (while safely holding it with a pair of pliers), and use the warm nail to punch the holes. I used an awl instead.





Watching the water spurts.



Apparently with a bottle and holes spaced further apart, the highest spurt should arc less. But for us it went further out. We'll have to try a bottle sometime to see how the arcs compare.

 

We did try spacing some holes further apart on the other side of the cup. But Joey didn't really care too much about how much each spurt arced, he just wanted to see how fast the water would spurt out.



Zipping Balloon

We had some balloons sitting around, so while my son was in a sort of bored mood the other day, I took one out to have some fun. I simply blew up the balloon and let the air out, and he really delighted in seeing the balloon go "zipping" around the house.













We finally decided to draw on the balloon. I asked Joey what he thought would happen to the faces we drew once the air went out of the balloon, and he said "they'll get smaller!"












Of course the faces got smaller, and he was so very excited to see his prediction was correct. We all had a lot of fun with this activity; it was worth blowing up that balloon again and again to see how excited he was!

Evaporation

My three year old son is really enjoying experimenting with water these days. Adding food coloring makes it that much the better. Today we started a simple evaporation experiment. We put equal amounts of colored water in two mason jars. We used some existing stickers on the jars to mark the level of the water. Then we put a lid on only one of the jars, and placed them on a sunny shelf. We'll watch the jars for a few days.

Joe's hypothesis: the jarred lid's water will turn green and the unjarred lid's water will turn red. (I love how kids think!)



Excited to start the experiment!

Adding food coloring so we can see the water level more easily.

Lidding one jar.

On the sunny shelf. We'll watch for a few days.

 

Update (Sunday, September 25th): This morning Joey noticed that the lidded jar looks "foggy". We were able to point out that the unlidded jar's level dropped slightly, but it was quite enough for Joey to really notice. My husband and I are actually curious if the unjarred lid's water will end up darker - will the food coloring evaporate or not? We'll see!