Table Time a Rousing Success

Well, I'd say the kids are enjoying Table Time! Our first day was Monday, and we took it easy by doing some artsy stuff. Tex worked on drawing a Dilophosaurus (using his How to Draw Dinosaurs book, which starts with the basic ovals, etc. and adds detail from there) and instructed me to draw a "swampy, forest-y" background of "ferns, cycads, and gingkos". My ferns rocked, if I do say so myself. When the dino was drawn and colored we cut it out and Tex glued it to the background.

Since then we've been into science experiments. I picked up those chemistry sets for ages 5+ at Target's toy clearance since Noodle's been wanting to do some of this kind of stuff, and the grade school sets are really too advanced. Yesterday we did an experiment called "Dancing Powders" where you take some baking soda and some crystalline citric acid, measure out equal amounts of each, and the pour water on them to activate the chemical reactions. Noodle wanted to do it so many times (and using test tubes, cups, pipettes, and any other equipment he can round up) that I finally had to set him up with his own little bowls of each substance for mixing.

Tex and I, meanwhile, are working on a hypothesis. Another science experiment book (this one from the Target Dollar Spot) has instructions for seeing if a gummy bear will soak up water and grow larger. We didn't have any "real" Gummi Bears, so we used a gummy bear vitamin. We had to measure its length and width (he wrote the fractions out himself), trace its outline, and then put it in a cup, just covered with water. This morning we woke up to an almost completely dissolved gummy vitamin! As Tex observed, "I guess it got smaller, since it dissolved." We decided that perhaps the vitamins were of a different formula and did not behave the way a real Gummi Bear would, so we picked up a new bag of the real thing, measured and traced, and should have some results tomorrow.

And today's experiment was really fun! Take a wide cereal bowl, fill it almost full with skim milk, and wait for the milk to stop moving. Then at three equidistant points around the edge of the bowl you put drops of the primary colors of liquid food color (so for instance, red at 12 o'clock, blue at 4, and yellow at 8), being careful not to jostle or jiggle the bowl. Then you add 1 Tbsp of dish detergent right at the center of the bowl and get ready for a show! If I can figure out how to put up the video we shot of it, I will do that later.

Oh, and Tex's other big thing lately is substitution codes. We have this little dinosaur-themed workbook and on almost every page is the meaning of the dinosaur's name in picture code, and he's enjoying substituting the letters in working out what the words are. We also worked in one of the Puzzlemania books on a story where you have to fill in the word that fits each blank, then take the letters from the numbered blanks to complete the riddle at the end of the story. He tries a lot harder when he's reading words that he constructed on his own!! :-) We did these substitution codes for the entire hour that Noodle was in gymnastics class today.