Slices of Life

My boys could not have been more thrilled when I mentioned that we were going to be making some slime that changed color this week.  We have made lots of versions of slime before and it's always a huge hit with the boys. In order to make our slime I knew we'd need liquid starch, school glue, and to make it change color I ordered this thermochromatic pigment . With all our ingredients assembled, we set to work.  In our "science experiment bowl" (yes, we keep a cheap dollar store bowl set aside just for these types of things!) we mixed together equal parts glue and starch.  We added 3 teaspoons of the pigment to give it a nice color. We talked about what thermochromatic meant and how it worked. Alec immediately told us that thermo was temperature like thermometer and I explained that chromatic meant color.  So this meant our slime would change color based on temperature.  1/2 way through mixing and Evan decided we needed a photo since...

My kids love playing with play dough, slime, goop, and making new types of dough.  There was a time we were making something new just about every week. There's something about watching two or three ingredients combine that just fascinated them.  Sometimes our dough "experiments" failed but usually we had something new to play with and the joy lasted for several hours or days. Now that the kids are older we don't make dough as often but we still enjoy making something when we're bored and looking for something out of the ordinary to do. Most of the time I didn't measure or really follow a "recipe" so I have a hard time re-creating some of our favorite play doughs.  I thought I take the time to compile a list of recipes for easy reference: 1.  Beach dough-- This one smells like the beach and reminds us of summer!  It was the easiest to make too; one box of cornstarch and 1 bottle of Suave Ocean Breeze conditioner and enough baking soda to stiffen the ...

My boys spent their Saturday morning checking out a local 4-H science club.  Not being familiar with 4-H and any of the programs that they offer this was pretty new to us. Many of our homeschool friends participate in the program as well so we thought we'd give it a try. My boys LOVED it! They worked on a lot of fun Halloween experiments. First up:   They made slime.  Taking equal parts liquid clear glue and liquid starch mixed with some food coloring they were able to make blue, green or yellow slime. Next they started in on candy experiments: 1.  Dissolving candy pumpkins and sour patch kids: Taking 6 cups and filling two with water, two with cooking oil, and two with vinegar they divided the cups into two equal groups and put one candy corn pumpkin into one cup of water, oil and vinegar and then repeated the process with the sour patch kids.  They made predictions of what would happen and then set the cups aside to see what would happ...

With one last day of party planning and cleaning we, once again, hit the road for some errands on Friday.  Ian talked me into buying him a model making kit.  My husband and I have been talking about what a great hobby this would be for Ian but most of the kits we've found are for cars or airplanes and Ian has no interest.  Today he found a Monster Jam Gravedigger truck and begged me for the kit. I bought it and hoped that he wouldn't loose interest before he finished it.  I needn't have worried about it though, after a few pouting attempts to get me to help him he ended up putting the whole thing together (all by himself!) in an hour or two.  It came out awesome and he's so proud of it!  He's already talking about the next kit he'd like to try. We stopped at the library today since we had some books that were due and I talked the boys into looking around for some books.   The boys didn't really want to stay at the library but wit...

We had a pretty lousy start to our day and after lots of frustration and tears we were looking for something fun to do.  I told the boys we could explore and play with fizzing goop. My boys love goop; it's a simple mixture of cornstarch and water and it lends itself quite nicely to exploration.  Those non- Newtonian liquids are always so neat! I brought out some cornstarch and pop rocks and we set about making fizzing, fire cracking goop!   I divided one entire box of cornstarch into two bowls and added one packet of pop rocks to each bowl. Even before we added the water we could hear some crackling sounds. Once Ian poured the water in though it was really cool.  We heard popping, fizzing, and crackling sounds.  The boys said they could even feel the pop rocks fizzing as they stuck their hands in the goop to play with it. My oldest even swears that the goop smelled differently.  Since so much water was added to the goop, it wasn't all that goopy and th...