Science

The Set Up

I love using these simple lunch trays from Dollar Tree for little investigations like this. I put out the tools, small bowls (two filled with water), and the large bowl on the tray. This helps to keep the materials neatly organized and gives the child a defined workspace. To turn the packing peanuts into little snowmen I used acrylic paint markers to draw on the eyes, nose, scarf, and buttons. They turned out pretty cute! I then put the snowmen in the third bowl on the tray.

Keep Calm and Slime On

5 Surprising Benefits of Slime Play

Although slime may seem like an overnight sensation that came out of nowhere five years ago, the sticky, slippery, stretchy stuff kids can’t get enough of was actually first manufactured and sold by Mattel in 1976. Slime shot to superstardom a few years later as it first dripped, dropped, and covered the stars of Nickelodeon TV in the ‘80s. And who could forget the Slimer of Ghostbusters fame, the “focused, non-terminal, repeating phantasm”? With decades of staying power under its ooey-gooey belt, slime is clearly here to stay. As much as many parents wish slime would slip out of their kids’ lives forever, there are some surprising reasons to stick with it, including:

1.       Slime Increases Your Child’s Ability to Pay Attention

Sure, carefully mixing the right combination of ingredients to create the perfect batch of slime (not too sticky, just enough stretch) takes concentration. But squeezing, stretching, flattening, folding, and twisting slime can also improve your child’s focus. Research indicates that busying the hands allows the brain to concentrate on other things, including listening to instructions, stories, and lessons.

2.       Slime Builds Fine Motor Skills

Measuring, pouring, mixing, stirring, squeezing, smashing, rolling, twisting, and pressing are all amazing ways to strengthen the hand muscles and build fine motor skills.

3.       Slime Introduces Basic Chemistry

Your kids know that mixing the correct amounts of contact lens solution, baking soda, and glue makes slime. You can explain that the reason those ingredients turn into slime when combined is a chemical reaction between the main ingredients – the polyvinyl alcohol in glue and the borate ion that’s created when they mix baking soda with contact lens solution. Together, these two ingredients create a non-Newtonian fluid. That’s another way of saying slime is neither a solid nor a liquid, has no shape, and can change elasticity to flow between your child’s fingers or bounce like a ball.

4.       Slime Stimulates the Senses

The more senses involved when your child plays, the more connections their brains are making. Kids are obviously engaging their sense of touch while playing with slime, as well as sight, and sometimes hearing (hands up if your kids make fart sounds with their slime).

5.       Slime Is Creative

Making and playing with slime requires creativity and imagination! Kids can add colors, glitter, beads and other elements to their recipes to create custom batches of slime and the way they play with their slime is entirely up to them! Will the twist it into ropes? Roll it flat and use cookie cutters to make shapes? Ball it up and bounce it? Create freeform shapes as they squeeze and stretch? Slime has no rules, so kids direct slime play their own way.

So if you’re looking for something fun to do today, why not whip up a batch of slime? Our favorite recipe is below:

1.       Pour 5 ounces of Elmer’s white blue into a small bowl

2.       Add ½ cup of water and mix (add a drop or two of food coloring here for colored slime)

3.       Add ½ teaspoon of baking soda and mix

4.       Add 1 tablespoon of contact lens solution (make sure it contains boric acid) and stir until the slime lifts away from the sides of the bowl

5.       Knead the slime with your hands, adding a dash of saline until you have the consistency you want

The more varied your child’s play experiences are, the better off they’ll be! Enter, water, the most common substance found on Earth. Essential to all forms of life, it’s also an essential component of your toddler and preschooler’s playtime. Lifting, pouring, carrying, and splashing water build gross motor skills, while scooping and squeezing build fine motor skills. Water play also supports hand-eye coordination and balance, and, when done with friends, encourages cooperation, sharing, and turn taking. Water play with toys can build vocabulary, measurement, early science skills, and so more. Plus, water play activities can be adjusted to be either calming or energizing. Are you in? Make a splash, with one of our favorite wet n’ wild activities today:

1.       Fill ‘Er Up! Set various plastic containers in a large plastic bin or tray. Include smaller cups, larger pitchers, and everything in between. Fill a few of the containers with water (food coloring makes water play extra fun) and watch as your child transfers water from one container to another. Turkey basters, eye droppers, wooden spoons, and swizzle sticks make for a fun challenge.

2.       Sort It Out! Fill a large plastic bin with water and add a set of colorful items – math counters, letter tiles, pom poms, etc. Provide a scooper, spoon,  tongs, and bowls and see if your little one can find and sort the items into the bowls by color.

3.       Soup’s Up! Walk the backyard with your child, looking for items to add to their “soup”. Choose leaves, rocks, flower petals, dirt… then drop the ingredients into a large plastic bowl and stir! See if your kiddo can scoop their soup into smaller plastic bowls.

4.       Sink or Float? Fill your bin with water and collect a variety of items from around the house or the backyard. Ask your child to hypothesize, or make a guess, about which items will sink and which will float, then test their theories! Things to try: rocks, sheets of paper, paperclips, toy cars, plastic blocks…

5.       Coffee Shop! Fill your bin with water and provide plastic cups, saucers, spoons, and scoopers. Place your order and watch as your child fills the cup with pebble or dirt “grounds”, stirs them, and pours you a cuppa.

6.       Go Fish! Fill your tub with floating foam fish and see if your fisherman can “catch” them with a small net or spoon.

7.       Car Wash! Muck up your kiddo’s trike or play car, then fill a bucket with sudsy water, large sponges, and rags, and watch as they spiff up their rides!

8.       Bowl O Bubbles! Pour a bit of dish washing liquid into your bin, add water and a few drops of food coloring (different colors, please!), and let your little one loose with differently sized bubble wands.

9.       Sponge Toss! Assign each child a sponge color, then drop them into a bowl of water and show them how to squeeze them dry. Practice dropping and squeezing, then add another (large) bin or bowl full of water and see if your child can toss their sponge in.

10.   Color Lab! Use food coloring to color one cup each of red, yellow, and blue water. Show your colorful kiddo how to mix red and blue to make purple, red and yellow to make orange, green and blue to make light blue, green and red to make yellow. Then let them experiment, pouring and mixing their own custom colors.

Fun for all ages, there’s no end to the ways kids can play with water. So set up your bins and scoopers today and go get wet!

The very first Learning Resources product I purchased as a parent many years ago was the Helping Hands Fine Motor Tool Set™. And 5 years after purchasing it, the tools are still used by both my kids on a regular basis. I often get asked which of the tools is best and why, so I thought I’d share a little explanation of how we use each of the fine motor tools and how they help with developing skills for children of different ages. To help you see them in action I set up a simple pom pom and large building brick sorting activity.

Squeezy Tweezers™

My 3 year old always goes for the Squeezy Tweezers first! They are the perfect combination of a tweezer and scooper. Squeeze the handle to open the ball, scoop up the pom pom and then release the pressure on the handle for the ball to close.

 The recommended age for these is 3-7 years old. Some younger children will likely be able to use them but they do require a certain level of hand strength and coordination to open and scoop with the ball. This particular tool demands the entire hand to work, which really helps to strengthen all of those fine motor hand muscles leading to better hand strength.

Tri-Grip Tongs

This neat twist on a tong has three prongs rather than the conventional two. This configuration aims to help children develop better pencil grip strength. It is designed to try and mimic the same finger placement that your child will use when learning to write. Add a little pressure to the prongs and then come together in the middle to be able to pick up objects.

The recommended age for the Tri-Grip Tongs is 4-9 yrs old which I think is an accurate recommendation. My 3 year old had a little trouble holding the tongs with three fingers as intended, but was still able to use them by squeezing with her hand. The pom poms were a great item to practice using these on.

Handy Scoopers™

We usually enjoy the Handy Scoopers with water play because there are tiny perforated holes in the scoop part of the tool which make for lots of fun water transfer play. They are effectively a pair of scissors with a big scoop-like ball on the end. They are very easy to open and close and can be used with all sorts of sensory bases.

The age recommendation for these is 3-7 years old but my kids were able to use them at the age of two because they are really light and easy to open and close. I love these because they mimic the action of cutting with scissors and really help with scissor finger placement.

Primary Science Jumbo Tweezers™

Designed to encourage the use of a good pincer-grasp when transferring loose parts, the Jumbo Tweezers are great for sensory play and sorting. I like that the handle area is large but the grasp section is small therefore requiring accurate hand movements and the ability to pick up small and detailed items.

The Jumbo Tweezers are recommended for children aged 5-9 as they do require a decent level of hand strength to close the two prongs together. My 3 year old can comfortably use them and enjoys the large size. The Gator Grabber Tweezers™ are a great tweezer alternative for younger kids as they are half the size.

I hope this summary has been helpful for you, along with the photos to see the tools in action. If you are after a good starter set, I’d definitely recommend the Helping Hands Fine Motor Tool Set™ because you get a little bit of everything for a very reasonable price. In the set you also get a Twisty Dropper™ which is great for water play and science experiments! I have found the Learning Resources fine motor skills toys to be of great quality, with many of ours still going strong after five years of play.

Each family in the United States has found themselves at home…for a while. All this time has afforded us precious hours to do things we might not otherwise do. At Learning Resources, our minds turn toward STEM, and all the long-term experiments we might have put on the back burner simply due to a of lack of time.  

Below are a few overnight experiments that take a while. But hey – time is on our side! 

The Naked Egg  

How can you make an egg stay fully intact without its shell? The answer is (to this and many things): science! 

You will need: 

• Eggs 
• Vinegar 
• Cups 
• Corn syrup (for later) 

All you have to do is drop the eggs in, one per cup, and pour in the vinegar. The egg should be completely covered with the liquid. It’s okay if the egg floats a bit.

A chicken egg shell is made up of calcium bicarbonate. The acid makeup of the vinegar begins to react with the calcium of the egg shell. After just a short while, you will see bubbles appearing on the outside of the egg. This is carbon dioxide gas as a result from that reaction.

But now comes the hardest part: the waiting. It can take 12-24 hours before a good portion of the shell is removed. More bubbles and froth will appear. 

After the day of soaking, carefully remove the egg from the vinegar. The egg was soft, but still had a white, powdery coating. You can scrape it off, but with the egg being so delicate, it might break. Be careful! 

We used a flashlight to find the yolk in the dark. The egg glowed something awesome, but the yolk was hard to pinpoint.  

So we poured some fresh vinegar in the cup, and soaked it for another 12 hours.  

The egg came out the next morning very rubbery and fragile. We slipped the naked egg into a cup filled with corn syrup and let that soak overnight. The results were amazing! Because the corn syrup has very little water content and the egg does, the water inside the egg begins to move across the membrane (“skin” layer) and starts to equalize. What’s left is a very baggy egg.

How to Make a Rainbow Bouquet 

While you are grabbing essentials at your local big box store, why not grab a bouquet of fresh flowers? Creating your own rainbow bouquet can be turned into a fragrant scientific experiment over the course of a few nights. A trick often used by florists, dyeing white roses or carnations with colored water is actually an example of capillary action, or the ability of a liquid to flow in narrow spaces against gravity. 

What you will need: 

• White roses or carnations 
• Scissors or knife (adults only!) 
• Containers 
• Food coloring and water 

Remove all the leaves from the stem of the flower. The experiment is to see how the colored water will travel to the white petals, so you don’t want water diverted to the leaves. 

 Once the roses are clean, have an adult snip or cut them with a knife at an angle, leaving about 6-7 inches (adults only!).  

Next, stir up the liquid your flowers will be drinking for the next few days. Decide on your colors and place about 10-15 drops of food coloring in each container. Add warm tap water until the containers are about halfway full. Stir well! 

Place your flowers in their containers. Here, two were placed in each container. 

THREE HOURS 

Recently snipped flowers can be pretty thirsty. This is what the stem and bud of the blue flower looked like after just three hours. 

12 HOURS 

The next morning, the tips of the flower petals (and most dry part of the flower) were beginning to show color. How deep will the color be with each passing day?

DAY TWO

At the two-day mark, the colors were distinguishable, and the roses were thriving.

DAY THREE 

By the third day, the flowers were just beginning to wilt, but the colors were the most vibrant, but still a pastel hue. 

These roses were colored by capillary action. The colored water was pulled through the stem and made its way up to the petals. Transpiration occurs when the colored water evaporates from the flower petals.  

Overnight Crystals 

Some crystals take several days to grow, but here’s a simple overnight recipe to get some great crystals grown right in your refrigerator.  

You will need: 

• Epsom salt 
• Food coloring 
• Clear glass cup 

Epsom salt is another name for magnesium sulfate.  

In the clear glass, fill ½ cup really hot tap water, then stir in ½ cup of the Epsom salt. Stir for at least one minute. While some salt crystals will be not dissolved at the bottom of the glass, your stirring has created a saturated solution that’s ready to make crystals. 

Then add food coloring of your choice. Place the glass in the refrigerator and wait until the morning! 

Wow! By cooling this solution rapidly, it encouraged fast crystal growth due to the dense solution. Crystals grown this way will be thin and plentiful.

Happy Overnight Science!