"I Have A Dream" Project

My mother was at the I Have  A Dream speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in August of 1963. She was 18 and four months pregnant with my older brother.

One of her early memories from when she was a child was from when my grandfather, a fierce and devoted union leader, took her and my uncle with him to walk to union meetings because he thought he was less likely to be shot if he was with his children. There had been threats.

When my brother was about five, and my older sister a young toddler, my mother took them to a peaceful protest at People's Park in Berkeley, CA. Governor Reagan did not like those hippies and their Park. My brother can remember trying to run from the tear gas on his little legs, while my mother and her friend, both of them carrying a younger child, each held one of Dylan's hands and lifted him off the ground to flee.

As a young teen, I protested the first Gulf War, and as a young adult I protested the next Gulf War. In my thirties I took my children to sing union songs at the Madison capitol as corrupt politicians tore away at everything my grandfather worked for his whole life. I hope that I will not being protesting another Gulf War in my middle age, but I have my doubts.

Protest and social activism are a part of who I am, a part of my moral fiber. I find my faith and devotion in the power of people working for positive change.

I want my kids to grow up knowing that faith. I want them to know that people have that sort of power, and that great evils can be stood up to, can be fought with words and action, and that there is hope.

My kids and I read Martin's Big Words today. We had read it before and Anya sobbed inconsolably when it described his death. She requested that we not read the end today, and I struggled before closing the book early but did talk to them about his death being an important part of his story.

After that we did a project like this. I read part of MLK's speech to them, and we talked about how he imagined a way that the world could be better, and then as he grew up he acted on his dream and was able to make the world a better place. I asked them to think of ways that they could imagine the world as a better place while we created a sky collage out of tissue paper and construction paper.

I cut out clouds, and asked each kid to tell me what their dream was. It was tempting to prompt, since I was a bit worried I might end up with something like, "I have a dream that kids can have treats all the time, even before dinner when cruel mothers usually refuse." BUT I am so glad I didn't because I love knowing their unadulterated dreams.

Anya initially  said that her dream was "that people would plant more plants. To Eat. Because they are yummy." Then she switched to "people being nice to each other." And finally decided on "that everyone will stop throwing trash on the ground."

Alex first said that he hoped that people would stop shooting animals, but then told me that he hoped that people would stop shooting everything. Surprising coming from a kid who loves gunplay who is growing up in a place where hunting season is practically a holiday. Must be some of the California hippie rubbing off on him!

How Awesome is Measuring?

How we describe the world is incredibly important. This has been a recurring theme for me in everything from therapeutic psychology (where how we describe our processes and history becomes an integral part of how we experience our lives) to my tempestuous love affair with Science (the procedure for hypothesis testing demands precise measurement, and yet how we define our variable and even the act of observing our variables may alter their measurement. Oh Science, you magnificent tease!).

For the preschool set, measurement is important because it integrates a bunch of early math components, and yet it is easy enough for them to do on their own, and is one of those things, like knock-knock jokes, that they seem to happily incorporate into their everyday life so frequently you might wish you had never handed them a ruler. There's counting, obviously, but also the thrills of comparing which helps them understand the importance of the ordinal/relational quality of numbers. The other thing about measuring is that it is so useful in the sort of simple experiments which we do in investigative learning. I've showed them how to measure before, used it in some of our exploratory play, but I had never just talked about measurement in general. And since I love nothing more than a meta investigation, I decided to get them going exploring the idea of precise ways to describe their world.

Footwear Measurement is vital.

Materials:

Printable Rulers, cut out
half sheets of paper folded and stapled to make observation books
pens/crayons
stuff to measure!


Methods:


1. I printed and cut out the rulers- I thought about trying to dig out some wooden rulers, but these were nice because the kids could wrap them around objects.

2. I made them each a book to write down their observations. I've been trying to get them interested in keeping a science journal, but so far they seem to only use them if I make a little mini-book for each project. I hope that this at least will help them get into the habit of recording their observations. Only one kid is ready to start trying to write and sound out words, so I suggested that they draw a picture of the object and write out its measurement in numerals.

3. I set them loose!

Results:

Baby Tiger is 7 inches long- I didn't even need Alex's translation!

Alex particularly loved this project, which was especially nice because unlike Anya, he is not terribly interested in practicing how to write numbers. But when it is in the name of science, he was all over it!

He was stymied by a box that was longer than his ruler. When I asked him if he could think of ways to measure it, he suggested we cut it up and measure the pieces, but was dismayed at the thought of losing the box in the process. I had to hold my tongue not to bring up Schrodinger's Cat which is a bit much even for me to wrap my head around! But the essence of the problem (precise observation altering the subject) seems similar enough that I was tempted! Eventually I showed him how to mark the spot where the ruler ended, measure the remainder and add the measurements together, but he's not quite there yet in terms of comfort with the idea of addition. He was really excited when I did it, though, and went back to measuring smaller things with even greater enthusiasm.

Anya measured her shoe collection almost exclusively, and measured them in ways I was not expecting, which was cool.

She lost interest pretty quickly, but went back to it after she saw Alex still excited ten minutes later.

She also suggested that we could start measuring our trees, and came up with some interesting ways that we could do so, involving Luke scaling to the top and dropping down a very long measuring tape. I told we could measure how high he goes in them next time he's pruning.

Discussion:

After they spent about 45 minutes measuring things, we watched a clip from Sid the Science Kid about measuring, and we talked about why measuring is important. I framed it in terms of hypothesis testing. Recently we had been talking about plants that could continue to grow in water, like green onions after you cut them, and the kids were insistent that they didn't need soil at all and we could plant a water garden. I told them that I thought they would grow more in the soil, and that only certain plants would grow in the water. To show them how measuring could be used to precisely describe the world, I explained that we could try one onion inside and another outside and observe. They both immediately understood that the bigger one would show whether soil or water was best for the plant's growth, but it was only after I mentioned that there might be very little difference that Anya grabbed her ruler and said we could measure the difference to see even a little change.

This brought to mind our chicken scratch notes on the kitchen doorway showing the kids' heights over time. We marked their heights again, then measured the amount that each had grown since last year, as well as the difference between them. I showed them how to use the metric and imperial units. I think the idea of comparisons over time and between individuals became real to them during this part, which was awesome. I hope that we will be referencing the stuff we learned today in our projects in the future. I also really want to find a kid friendly scale! More dimensions! More measurement!

Flower Challenge

Tinkerlab is an awesome blog about fostering creativity and hanging out with kids doing cool stuff. I've come to rely on Rachelle's fun activities and inspiration, as well as enjoying her perspective. This mommyblog thing is a delicate line to walk- how to write passionately about your beliefs and children without coming off as judgmental about other perspectives or styles; how to talk honestly about the good and the bad, the mistakes and the failures; how not to fall into the trap of bloggy narcissism; how to write about the good stuff without causing others to hateread your blog and doubt your words. Tinkerlab is a keeper, walking that line with a grace and an enthusiasm  that I find infectious.

One of the awesome community-building projects she does over there are her Creativity Challenges, in which she invites other parents to write and link to creative projects related to the theme of the challenge. Unlike the types of projects I typically blog about, these challenges should be child-driven; that is, that the children should initiate and follow through with their own creativity, rather than participate in an activity that the parent/teacher designs and sets up. I love the idea of child-driven work, and my kids certainly do a ton of it on their own, but I seldom set up "invitations" as many child-driven parents do. I prefer, because of my own temperament and the pressure of working from home with no child care, to do slightly more structured work, activities, and then let them children take it wherever they want. I haven't taken part in the previous challenges partly because I imagined that if I tried just setting them loose on a totally child-driven challenge, that they would go in opposite directions and want me to follow- a pretty common problem in raising twins! But on the way home, as we were talking about flowers and root systems, I decided to go for it and join in on the Flower Challenge.

I explained the idea behind the challenge, and at first Anya did not want to do it because she thought the word challenge meant it would be a competition. She's not naturally averse to competition, in fact, both of them are so fiercely competitive that any whiff of there being a winner and a loser and there is sure to be a knockdown drag-out fight- Anya has learned that to maintain her awesome relationship with Alex, they need to just stop competing. I wonder if her dad and uncles will ever learn that! But when I re-framed it as a challenge for her mind to think of cool creative fun projects to do with flowers, she got on board. We talked a little about how they could think of learning experiments to do or questions to ask and try to solve about flowers, or they could gather flowers and do something with them, or they could make flowers out of something else. They decided to gather flowers, and Anya wanted to decorate our windows with them, while Alex wanted to attach the flowers to a piece of paper and paint a scene to go with them.

I asked Anya how she would like to attach the flowers to the window- we couldn't use contact paper because the flowers she were quite large, and she first wanted to use glue or starch, as we had with tissue paper window decorations in the past. Eventually she decided on tape, so I got her set up with some packing tape and left her to work on it while I helped Alex get his paint set up.

Alex arranged his plant bits on his paper and started gluing them, then painting in the scene, then gluing, then painting and so on. Alex is a kid who imagines all kinds of wild scenarios and is usually the driving force behind the complex imaginary games they play, and who spends hours designing and taping together robots made from the recycling, and who will dictate ten page stories to me every chance he gets. So I was surprised to see that he decided to create a very naturalistic scene where the bits of plants were representative of whole plants. The only exception is the dandelion puff as a storm cloud, which may have been influenced by me commenting on a similarity the other day. He's been fascinated with rainbows since we saw two different double rainbows on our drive home from Upper Michigan last week, so he created a sunny and rainy day, but then didn't want to paint a rainbow because he was worried he wouldn't be able to do it without ruining the rest of the picture that he was so pleased with. Kind of a bummer of a feeling, but I didn't want to push him as he seemed to drop it quickly and move on (which is rare for my ruminative son!). I will probably do a more focused project on rainbows, and hope that builds some confidence for painting them.

Alex's Sunny and Rainy Day

Anya came over while Alex was working, and decided that his project looked like more fun, so he gave her some of his collected flowers, and she went out with me to pick some more. She started with a large flat dandelion leaf and immediately declared that it was the grassy hill. This was also surprising, since Anya is often a very literal kid, and I fully expected her to glue the flowers down and paint a vase to hold them. She was playing with a magenta bloom, looking at it from different angles and seemed unsure of what to do next. I asked if it looked like anything and she decided it was a fairy skirt. Once she had that decided, she was eager to go hunt for some petals to be the wings and a round flower to be the head. I let her pick two fresh iris petals, despite the usual picking ban on my favorite flowers, because I knew how perfect they would be as wings- see, I kind of suck at child-driven... I just want to get in there and do it with them! She glued them in herself, and I took myself over to Alex so I wouldn't be tempted to interfere with her vision for the fairy.

Fairy Seeing Flowers She's Never Seen Before by Anya

It ended up being a really fun project, and I love it when my assumptions about the kids are challenged!

Marbling Paper

I love the look of marbled paper like Suminagashi, but have been put off by the unknown chemicals and hassle of getting pre-made kits- I was especially worried that a kit would turn out to be too difficult for the kids.

Then I saw this post on Inner Child Fun, about how to do paper marbling using just laundry starch and acrylic paints!

I have tons of old acrylics laying around, so all I needed to buy was a $2 bottle of starch, which is useful for so many projects we do anyway.

I set each kid up with a small, flat-bottomed plastic container and poured in about 1/2-1" of starch. Then each kid chose their colors, and I let them drip the paint right into the starch. Then they used bamboo skewers to swirl the paint and starch. We lay cut pieces of watercolor paper on the marbling solution, then lifted them up and put them in a large container of freshwater, where the starch washed off, leaving the paint in beautiful patterns. We set them to dry on an old sheet.

Some things we learned:

•  The really old (~18 years old!) ones had often gotten too dry or had changed in some way that caused them to drop to the bottom of the starch, which meant that they would not swirl and could not be lifted off with the paper floating on top- I did try sinking a paper to the bottom, and while it picked up some of the old colors, it was a garbled mess, not pretty and swirly.
• The more liquid, "soft-bodied" acrylics in squeeze bottles worked much better than the more expensive professional paints in tubes. 
• Lots of small drops works better, because overzealous preschool squeezing of the paint causes huge glops of paint which immediately sink to the bottom.
• Glitter can be added after the paint and will transfer beautifully.

• We ran into a funny issue which I haven't solved yet: Our first prints came out great and very little of the paint came off the paper in the wash along side the starch. But as we progressed, more and more of the paint came off in the wash. I tried changing to fresh water and changing to fresh starch. The new starch helped with a certain muddiness that was taking over - all preschool art must eventually become Preschool Gray- but even with an essentially new set-up, we had a harder time keeping the paint on the paper in the wash. Eventually I tried just not washing some, which caused them to stick a bit to the cloth where they were drying, but I just peeled them off, re-washed them and lost no paint.
• Note that acrylics do not wash out of clothes, and can permanently adhere to many non-porous surfaces if not cleaned up right away with soap and water. 

Simple Machines for Preschoolers

Child-led learning. It all sounds so lovely and peaceful. But really? I end up using child-led inspiration for our activities when the kids are at their worst, when nothing I do can stop the cycle of twin-on-twin aggression, when everyone is too tired or sick or grumpy to concentrate on what I planned.

Alex and Anya were having a bad morning, switching off roles of tattler and mischievous imp, with increasing escalation and contrariness towards each other. Alex shouted from the living room, "No, Anya! Don't stick that in the couch! Mama, Anya won't stop and she's ruining our couch!"

When I got to the living room, Anya was scowling at Alex and mumbling something about a lever while gripping a long skinny paintbrush. She had been shoving it into a hole in the couch so she could make a lever to push and pull.

Things were getting dire. I needed something to distract them. Science to the rescue!

I asked them if they would like to learn about levers.  I took the paint brush and showed them how moving the whole thing moved it only in one direction, while if I balanced it on a Lego, I could push down on one end and watch the other end rise. I introduced the idea of pivoting, and that there was specific point at which the brush pivoted, which is also called a fulcrum. We looked at some levers around the house, like scissors, and I had them identify the pivot point.

I looked around for a quick and dirty way to show them the difference in the amount of work that it took to lift things with a lever and without. We had an old box filled with Playmobil parts, and I duct taped the trusty paintbrush to the bottom of the box and had the children lift it straight up. Then I had them add in our Lego fulcrum again and try pushing down to lift it up. I described how when we did it the first way, our muscles did all of the work, but in the second way, the lever did some of the work, meaning less work for our muscles.

I asked them to think about if we would be able to lift more or less with a lever. I asked them if they could think of any outside toys we had that were levers. They struggled with that question a bit, so I asked if they could lift each other up in the air- which backfired, because Anya can totally lift Alex- but then asked if any of their outside toys made it easy for them to take turns lifting each other up in the air. I sat in front of them going back and forth with my finger on a pencil lever held over a Lego fulcrum, and eventually they realized that see-saws are simple levers.

Since Anya's desire to push and pull levers was the start of all this, I gave them plenty of time to play with all our improvised levers and make some new ones of our own- though I did convince her to avoid poking more holes in the couch to do so.

Next we moved on to ramps, which were much easier to grasp- perhaps I should have started with them? I demonstrated how a little car needed me to push it on a flat board, but would move on it's own down a ramp, again emphasizing that in the former, my muscles had to do the work and in the latter, the simple machine did the work.

I was hopeful that if I set them up with a good ramp that I could take a kid-break while they explored. I love doing these projects, but I think we all do better if I can have plenty of downtime between projects!

I grabbed the remains of the (poorly constructed) dollhouse that I built for Anya a couple of years ago and duct taped two boards together. One side we propped up in the couch, the other was to let the cars run on after they built up speed on the ramp. I was going to have them measure the length that each car got on the board, but all of them went much further, so I settled for giving them a piece of tape to mark the farthest any car got on the rug a couple feet out from the ramp.

They tried a ton of different small vehicles, and seem to realize quickly that the cars with motors never built up speed- we had a good but brief talk about how those cars are designed to go forward powered by the motor, and that the wheels could not move freely with gravity, like simpler cars could. I did have to remind them to not fling the cars down the ramp, but rather than phrasing it as a rule, I explained that we were measuring the work that the ramp was doing, and that if we used our muscles to propel the car, we wouldn't be measuring just the work of the ramp.

They also experimented with pulling the ramp farther out or pushing it in, changing the angle, and the behavior of the cars going down it. Very cool to watch them exploring!

Eventually Anya started wandering off, but I thought we could milk the ideas I had introduced just a bit more. As we were walking to the backdoor, I asked them to look around for more levers and ramps. Alex, who was still very into rolling things down ramps, went flying over to the fridge and announced, "Ramp!" proudly at the magnetic marble run. Yay!

Anya and I went ahead outside while he played and Anya peered around and told me in that condescending preschooler way, "Now, Mama, the slide, right here? That is a ramp, Mama, did you know that?"

She also decided that the rocking horse was a lever, pointed out the see-saw to me, and told me that we should use a ramp to get the snowballs on top of each other for a snowman.

Science FTW!

Math Fun: The Counting Corn Game

I wanted to come up with a math game that would be helpful to both of my kids, even though they have very different skills sets/ ability levels. This is a fun activity to set up with the kids as well as fairly open-ended in how exactly you play and process the experience, so that you can let the kid guide how much they want to continue to explore the ideas. It'll also be fun even if kid doesn't want to "work" on specific counting skills; playing around with little objects in and out of little containers is just fun on its own!

Materials:
1 ice cube tray (or other sectioned container like a bead/tackle box or silverware tray) per kid
Blank stickers and a pen (or any other way to label each little section)
Unpopped popcorn/ dried beans/pennies/ other small counting object
Small shallow containers like large jar lids




Methods:
1. I showed the kids how I would write on number on each sticker, then asked them to tell me which number to write next. I think they enjoy getting to tell me what to do, and it makes them have an active role in the creation of the game. Plus, while they are busy bossing me around, they are practicing their counting!

2. I placed the first couple of stickers along the "back wall" of each ice cube section- so that they could see the number even when it was filled with stuff. Then I had them put the remaining stickers on, though I did hand them to the one at a time to prevent skipped numbers and to make sure they did them in a row. I think that counting and  early addition and subtraction work is so much easier for them when things are neat and precise, so despite my intrinsically messy nature and my slight preference for rebellion over order, when we do math, I try to teach them to do things with an inherent sense of order that includes things like counting in rows and not skipping steps of a process.

3. I gave them each a  bowl full of unpopped popcorn and showed them how to count one kernel at a time to get the right number in each section. The kids will pretty much take it from there. I just let them guide me as far as what extra guidance they might need, and we brainstormed solutions to problems together.

Results & Discussion:
Here are some of the things that came up:

- Alex, who has a lot of fixed-mindset traits, and is hesitant to try something if he thinks he can't master it immediately, was very concerned that he didn't "know how many are the big numbers". He already has some of these traits, but the fact that Anya often masters skills like comfort with the "big numbers" just makes it more difficult for him. We talked about how each of our number slots was one number higher than the last- I had him verbalize that after asking leading questions about the lower numbers which he hasn't expressed any anxiety around. And then we came up with a plan that if he got to a number that he was worried about, he would look at the last number and add one more, which he was excited about as a solution, and I was excited about as proto-addition work!

-The physical act of manipulating the kernels and (especially) fishing them out of the ice cube trays if they accidentally added too many was a great fine motor activity. It was challenging for my guys, I would probably use bigger objects (like dried garbanzos, mancala stones or large wood beads) and bigger containers for kids any younger or for anyone that wanted to focus more on math and less on fine motor.

- Once they were done, I went through and counted each container, using a knitting needle to sort of arrange the kernels in rows and point to each as I counted aloud, encouraging the kids to count with me so that it wasn't so much me checking their work as us looking at it together- the kids usually noticed their mistakes before I said anything and were really great at figuring out if they needed to add or remove one or two to get to the right number. It also, I hope, functioned as a demonstration of how I count things. Demo would normally come in the beginning of a lesson, but I really liked how they worked out their own ways of doing it, then watched me, then added certain parts of my method to theirs as they liked.

-After a while, I got out the large jar lids and gave them to the kids to be their counting trays. They would fish out the kernels and could then manipulate them in the lids without losing any, which was very helpful for lining them up in rows in order to make counting easier. Anya has been very interested in skip counting, and lining up in rows was a great way to add a visual/real life component to something we had only talked about and tried out while driving in the car.

Coming up with math activities doesn't come as naturally to me as for science activities for the preschool set, but I was pleased with this. I'd like to start working on more skip counting, and perhaps some abacus work, or something which helps start conceptualizing the meaning of the digits in larger numbers and the meaning of place value.

Marshmallow Estimation

The kids were intrigued by a contest at the drop-in care at the gym*, one of those ones where you estimate the number of candies in a jar and whoever is closest wins. They carefully wrote out their names and guesses (Anya said 101, Alex said 100 right after- he's almost got the Price Is Right strategy down. So close and yet so far.) and dropped them in the box.

This seemed like the perfect chance to get them interested in the idea of estimating, especially since the most frequent question I get is, "How could you know?" They are both eager for learning new tools to understand the world and predict how it will work.

I took four identical mason jars and put miniature marshmallows in each- five, ten, twenty and one hundred.

Then I made up quick sheets for the kids to fill out- a dotted line on top for their names, then four rows, each with a sketch of a jar and a box.

I asked them to tell me what an estimate is ("A guess!"), then talked to them about the difference between a guess and an educated guess. I tried to emphasize that an estimate involved using your senses and mindfulness/"using your head" since they are always interested in the body and we are struggling with both of them not thinking about what they are doing, from rushing to put on clothes and doing it backward to tenaciously clinging to every conclusion they jump to, no matter how much that conclusion flies in the face of their experience of the world. I asked them to tell me times that people used estimates, and they mentioned counting stars, contests (Thank You, Curious George!) and when prompted about things I do in the house, they mentioned that when I am cooking I estimate ingredients, but that they still have to measure.

I had them each take a jar, and encouraged them to pick it up, turn it around, look at the marshmallows from all different sides, feel if there was any difference in weight (could really do a lot more with this using lighter jars and heavier counting objects). We put the jars in ascending and descending order based on how much each looked to be filled.

Once they had explored them for a bit, I asked them to draw a picture of what the marshmallows looked like in the jar, then write the number of marshmallows that they estimated was in each next to the picture. I wanted to encourage them to really look at the different volume that each number took up, rather than just focus on trying to count.

It was really cool to see them working up from being able to simply count the marshmallows to actually having to work out a way to estimate. As I suspected, both of them had an immediate inclination to count, even when it was impossible. When they got stymied by that I encouraged them to look at the jars, compare them with the jars they had already done, and make their estimates from that. I started to talk about the amount of marshmallows doubling, but while Anya especially has been very interested in proto-multiplication (3 sets of 2 makes 6, take a away 2 and 2 sets of 2 makes 4), the abstract idea of doubling was a little more than they could do right now.

In the end, we went through and talked about each of their estimates while looking at the jars together, then counted each jar to see how close they got. Then I let them eat the marshmallows. Math = Fun, guys! Remember that (not the obscene number of marshmallows)! Now let's go run around the yard for an hour!

* I recently conquered my fear of going to the gym, which has allowed me to restart the Couch to 5K program (because it turns out that running outside in Wisconsin is not for the out of shape and feint of heart). It's a post for another day, but running again has made me feel like a new woman. I did not realize just how much of my energy was being burned up simply by trying to stay afloat rather than get pulled down by the dark undertow of depression. I am extremely thankful to Luke, for keeping my gym membership alive even when I didn't use it for so long, and to my friend Jenny who inspired me to get back to running. I am also thankful that my kids will finally allow themselves to be left at the drop-in care, so that I no longer have to push 90+lbs of kid-and-stroller in order to run. Seriously, this is the best development in my life since finishing nursing school!

Rainbow Snow!

We just got our very first snow of the winter, but I was loathe to dig out their snowsuits from the packed suitcases waiting by the door for our trip up north tomorrow... so I decided to bring the snow into the kids instead!

Inspired by this post at the Chocolate Muffin Tree about painting snow outside with colored water, I filled an ice cube tray with water, then put a couple drops of food coloring/gels in each.

I went outside and scooped up some fresh snow, careful to get only the cleanest, since I had a feeling it was going to end up being eaten.

I handed the kids paintbrushes at first to drip the color into their bowls, but the little brushes didn't carry much of the colored water and were difficult to control, so I grabbed a couple of used, clean medicine syringes (the kind without needles, obviously!) and let the kids start filling and squirting them into their snow how ever they liked. And they *loved* it all, doing the whole thirty minute activity twice in the same night!

They kept the paint brushes for stirring and poking. I had thought that scooping and packing the snow would be fun, so I brought out spoons and small containers, but as soon as they had spoons they both just set to eating it like ice cream, delighting in the silliness of it all. In fact, after the first round when we had to stop to eat, they drank their colored snow water with dinner.

Anya explored how plain water squirted made a clean tunnel to the bottom of the bowl, then set about making a blue green lake at the bottom, so the snow had "something to float on"

We also tried squirting separate drops of all the colors onto the bottom of a bowl, packing fresh snow down into it, then inverting the bowl and looking at the rainbow patterns that the snow took up (the first photo of the post is from that experiment).

Overall, tons of fun, very little mess, no expense, a little color theory and a little physics as we talked about temperature. Win!

Bones (and a bit of eyes!)

We are keeping the kids home from preschool for a couple of months, and to keep back the tide of inevitable  chaos and 3.75 year old madness, I designed units to do with them, including schedules and regularly scheduled edumacation and whatnot. This is Day 1, posted a couple weeks later because, um, nothing ever goes as planned!

First day of week one was marred by an eye doc appointment for Alex- and our eye doc appointments have been known to take five hours because she is always triple and quadruple booked or more, there's four rooms and two waiting rooms, all of which are full and the doc cycles through each room while her staff cycles people in and out of rooms. It's not unusual to have three stints in the waiting rooms with each visit, which is a pain for anyone, but I really think I deserve a medal everytime I make it through a visit like that with two small children.

To make matters worse, Anya had a sudden reaction to the antibiotic she was on for a sinus infection and we had to race to the bathroom down the hall many times.

However, the eye doc had a great model of the eyeball and I talked them through all the parts of the eye, and we tried looking through the lens showing various pathologies, so they could see how if anything happened to the lens it would not let light in. I wrapped my coat over their heads and held the cataracts lens up to the one spot I was letting light in, and asked them to tell me what they could see. We also looked at the eye muscles and talked about how the doctor could move them and shorten them, but only because Alex had strabismus surgery last year and Anya will have it next spring.

A side note on preschoolers and twins and surgery: I've read that you should consider carefully whether to tell kids much details about upcoming potentially traumatic procedures, but decided that it would be good for my kids to know. When I started talking to Anya about needing surgery, Alex piped up to tell her about his experience, and to tell her which parts were scary, but how it wasn't *actually* scary, how his eyes hurt afterwards and he wanted me to be there, but that then I came and it was better. Anya asked him questions ("Was it scary when they took you away from Mama?" "No, it was a little bit scary, but then I was pretty brave and the doctor was nice."). I told them that my mom would come to visit for Anya's surgery just like she ahd for Alex's and that got them pretty excited. They are planning to do each and every thing exactly the same, but with the roles reversed. Anya will wake up before it is light out and go to the hospital, and Alex will stay home with Mama's Mama and make cookies for Anya to have when she feels a little better. I really think this is one of those times that the awesomeness of twins shows through.

When we finally got home from the doctor, we started talking about bones. There were a couple of points that I wanted to make sure we covered, and then I oversimplified all the rest.

Important Points:

• Bones are hard and rigid, so they are strong but they can break (the kids are obsessed with casts and stories about broken limbs, so we had a headstart on this one), They keep us upright and protect our body.
• Different bones have different jobs in our body; some help us stay upright (backbone), some help us walk or move things (long bones of the legs and arms, pelvis)  and some protect vulnerable parts of our bodies (brain, ribcage).
• Bones are white because they are made up of the mineral calcium, which we have to take into our body by eating things like yogurt and dark green vegetables and drinking milk.

My more advanced points that grow off the above:

• Bones can grow: kids' skeletons are growing and making them get taller, but bones also grow if a bone is broken and the two broken edges grow back together.
• Special cells called osteoblasts take calcium and other substances from the blood and turn it into bone on the growing or broken edges. If the rest of the body needs calcium, special cells called osteoclasts come along and break down the bone and let the calcium back into the blood. This is fun because you can pretend to be PacMan munching on bone. And again, we've talked about bones a lot prior to starting this lesson, so we had a head start.
• Bones make up a frame for all the rest of our bodies, and all the bones fit together and work together and with the muscles and connective tissue.

Our project for bones was fun and the kids loved every step of it (and it was so easy- I did it totally on the fly, no prep work or even forethought!): 

The Life-Sized Bone Puzzle

I had the kids take turns laying down and holding still on top of a long strip of easel/mural paper, while the other kid and I traced the outline of the their body. 

Once we were done I did a refresher on parts of the body- I was pretty sure they knew it all, but every once in a while they surprise me by not knowing something and I feel like a dummy for not teaching them something so simple.

Then while the kids played with their body outlines, I grabbed some cardstock we had leftover and started drawing bones.

You can see that they are really basic, and I was concerned that all the long bones would be indistinguishable, since my drawings leave something to be desired and the kids are only in preschool, so I included some tells, like the hands/feet attached to the lower extremities and the femur's prominent one-sided head where it fits into the pelvis. I put these aside for the moment.

I had the kids come over and show me where they knew they had bones: they pointed out their legs and arms, and poked especially at bony prominence like the ankle bone and wrist bone. That told me that 1) I should physically show them some other bones by making them more obvious and 2) I might have to work hard to convince them about bones like the hips which are harder to see and feel as obvious bones. 

I started going through the bones, showing them on my own body and theirs, bending and getting into funny positions to try to reveal the bones as much as possible, and having the kids do the same. They were totally into this- having each kid curl up in a tight ball while the other felt all the bumps of their vertebrae was especially awesome.

Once they were excited about the skeletal system and seemed comfortable pointing out where certain bones are on their own bodies, we moved back to the body outlines. Unlike some of my other projects, I emphasized simple, common names because I think even the simplified skeleton involved a lot of memorizing and that I was already pushing the kids' limits. It was important to me that they be exposed to the technical terms, but more important that they start seeing how all the individual pieces fit together.

Here's the basics of what I went through:

• The Skull - Protects our brains and forms our face.
• The Ribcage - I showed them pictures from an anatomy book to show them how it actually looks like a cage, surrounding and protecting the heart and lungs.
• The Pelvis/Hips-This is a tough one, since I didn't want to talk about the first thing I think of, which how the shape of the pelvis affects the passage of an infant through the birth canal. I talked instead about it looking like a butterfly and generally looking funny compared to other bones, and that it was where the legs attached.
• The Backbone - We stacked blocks on top of one another to show how the backbone is made of vertebrae stacked on one another, and I emphasized that it helps us stand upright.
• The Long Bones of the Arm and Leg - uppers each have one large bone, while the lowers have two bones. You can feel the lateral aspects of each lower arm bone.

As we went through these with the cards, I asked them to help me place them on the life sized outlines, and was quick to give help the first time around. Then I had them gather up the cards in piles and try to piece together the skeletons on their own. It was awesome. They were really excited, helped each other and only asked for help from me a little bit. Then they did it over and over and over till I put the whole project away the following day.

I eventually added some additional hints to help them remember some functions, like adding a red heart in the middle of the ribs, so that it actually looked like it was being protected. and the diaphragm muscle so that we could start talking about breathing in a couple of days.

One project I didn't do, but plan to someday, is to illustrate what happens to bone when the osteoclasts pull calcium from the bones- osteoporosis. That happens when the rest of the body needs calcium (and is of course much more complicated than this!) and is one of the reasons we need to take in enough food with calcium. To illustrate, take a sponge and get it soaking wet with a watery clay mixture (like slip), making sure to squeeze it out and let the slip soak in all the way, then let it dry. It should be rigid like a bone, then put it in a container of warm water, saying that the warm water is the osteoclasts, who have come to help get some calcium to the rest of the body. After a little while, the clay should get soft and dissolve out of the sponge. Cut the sponge open and let the kids see how the interior is spongy and the "bone" is no longer strong and hard. I hope that such a lesson would make the importance of eating enough calcium more real to them.

Lungs and Air

I've got my 3.75 year old twins at home instead of in preschool for a short period of time, this is Day 4 of my Big Preschool at Home project- I'm hoping to keep up with the blogging, both as a record and to help anyone else who is planning something similar or wants to supplement preschool with some discovery learning and science activities.

Upside Down Lungs = Tree!

Breathing and lungs did not lend themselves to preschool projects quite as easily as the heart or the GI system. We talked about air coming in, and I flipped over diagrams of the lungs so that they really looked like trees. I was surprised at what a difference that made- it was as though when I first started talking about the windpipe as a large tube, like a trunk, and how it branched and each branching tube got smaller, just like a tree, they were just staring at me blankly, but after I showed them the lungs actually looking like a tree they could visualize it.

The other analogy that I used was for the alveoli. I asked them to imagine a balloon tree, so that at the end of each little "twig" in the lung tree, there was a bunch of little balloon instead of leaves. Alveoli are often described as looking like grapes in anatomy classes and texts, but while they do look like grapes, that image of solid tissue (combined especially with the fact that to the naked eye lungs look solid rather than hollow) make eventual understanding of the function of the lungs that much more difficult. Plus, with young kids, balloons are way more interesting than grapes.

At this point I feel like I need to talk about why I am teaching my preschoolers about stuff that lots of adults don't know. I don't really have a good answer except "Why not?" They seem to love learning how things work, the natural curiosity of the age can be applied to a specific subject (like physiology) rather than being generalized in a series of random (and never-ending!) "Why?" questions- all it takes is just introducing a topic and getting them excited. It's like vocabulary- I could use the word nice to describe a desired behavior and while praising specific incidences, but "nice" is a pretty vague word, and the kids hear it to describe pleasant weather, as an exclamation along the lines of "rad!" and to describe a good steak. So I use the word considerate, and tell them how "consider" means to think, and how we want to think about how our actions affect those around us, and (since I know they are three and learn from concrete examples) then we talk about the real world, all from the perspective of being considerate: When you snatch a toy from Alex, how does it make him feel? Is it considerate to snatch? When you throw trash from the window of a moving car, what happens to it? Who cleans it up? Does it mess up nature? So is it considerate to litter? And pretty soon they are noticing the world through a new lens, one that is more nuanced and more practically applicable than the simpler concept of "nice". They can learn it, I mean, learning the meaning of words (or the way the world works) is a complex business which they are primed for right now, why not go ahead and expose them to a more thorough toolbox and let them use as much of that awesome ability to learn new concepts as possible? 

Maybe some of it will stick, maybe it will make biology easier for them (I kinda doubt that). Or maybe it will function as a cool foundation for developing investigative, scientific minds. Or maybe it will get them excited about asking questions and trying to figure out answers to those questions- wait those last two are the same thing: SCIENCE! Maybe it will prevent them from feeling like science is scary, as so many people do, just by taking away the barrier of scientific jargon. Or maybe it won't do a damn thing except help me, as a parent, come up with some fun stuff to do during these infuriating, amazing, exhausting, beautiful, long and over-so-fast days of raising young children. 

Back to the project!

We had a good foundation with the fact that the blood needs to bring air to the cells. And they knew enough to know that we breathe in through our lungs to get air. We busted out the stethoscope again and I traced where the air went in, down the trachea and into the lungs, and reminded them about how the ribs formed a protective cage around the lungs and heart. 

Then I got a balloon out and blew it up and deflated it several times, asking them to tell me what is inside of the balloon when it is full. We talked more about the lungs being an upside down balloon tree, and I asked them to take deep breaths and imagine that every time they did all the balloons on the tree got blown up super big, then on every breath out, they deflated. When the balloons were blown up, I continued, the blood could come by and grab some air from them and take it to the cells. 

We looked at some pictures of the alveoli capillaries, and I showed them how the blood came in without oxygen (blue), picked up air from the balloons, and then left filled with oxygen (red). Not sure if any of that part sunk in, but they loved the pictures and tracing the path of the blood from blue to red with their fingers.

The project I decided to do was about how we breathe in and out, rather than what happens to the air inside our body. It was not ideal, given the emphasis I placed on lung function in my week-long lesson arc- that is, I had kind of bound the whole week together on circulation not the mechanical way that we breathe. Hey, anyone who isn't as much of a physiology nerd as me, want a one sentence explanation of how we breathe? The diaphragm muscle moves down, creating space and a pressure vaccum that allows the lungs to expand, the alveoli fill up with air due to a pressure differential rather then being inflated like a balloon or a car tire, does that make sense? However, I was totally stumped how to make a hands-on project showing something like oxygen transfer. We could have played a game with trains to get into the idea of transportation, but I decided to go with a project where we built a little model of breathing because it seemed like it would hold the kids' interest more. In hindsight, I'm not sure if that's true!

We made a model of a lung that shows how when the diaphragm moves, air gets pulled in to the alveoli- represented by the balloon inflating inside the bottle. There are a ton of instructions for this project online, some listed below. Here's how I did it:


Materials


2 balloons (good to have spares in case you butcher your first one)
Small plastic bottle
duct tape
straw
scissors


Methods

1. Take the bottle and cut the bottom off.
2. Without inflating, tie one of the balloons off, then cut the top off of that balloon. Try fitting the cut top of the balloon over the cut bottom of the bottle. Cut a little less off next time if it doesn't fit or leaves only a tiny bit of the knotted balloon stem dangling from the bottom- you'll need to pull on that knotted end to create negative pressure in a minute.
3. Duct tape the cut balloon to the bottom of the bottle. Make sure to seal it well, because any air leaks will ruin the effect.
4. Take the second balloon and inflate it a couple of times- the balloon will inflate more easily during the experiment after being stretched. Then stick the straw into the balloon and secure with duct tape, again, being careful to seal well to prevent air leaks. Try blowing it up with the straw to check for leaks. You can stop right here and let the kids play with this contraption, they'll be able to blow up balloons like this even as little kids, which is so fun for them!
5. Insert the balloon side into the neck of the bottle and secure with duct tape, making sure there are no air leaks, but leaving the straw end free.

Procedure

Have the kids look at the deflated balloon inside the bottle- this is the lungs/alveoli. The bottle itself is the chest cavity/ribs and the cut and tied off balloon at the bottom is the diaphragm muscle.

Watch the lung-balloon carefully as you pull the diaphragm-balloon down and away from the chest-bottle: It will inflate, just like the lungs do when the diaphragm contracts and flattens, creating more space in the chest cavity, causing negative pressure and air is sucked right into the lungs.

Now, the balloon-lung may only inflate a little, possibly only enough to get rid of the folds of the balloon- a smaller lung-balloon or a large chest-bottle and diaphragm might make it more obvious. We used a small 16 oz. water bottle and two 10" balloons just because I had them lying around. If you run into problems with the lung not obviously expanding, check for air leaks, then try sucking on the straw so that the balloon has no residual air at all, then the difference when some air gets "breathed" in will be more obvious.

My kid enjoyed the project, but as I said, the meat of the lesson may have been over their head. They've definitely internalized the process of breathe in air with the lungs -> blood takes air from lungs and transports it to the cells, and that cells need more air when they are exercising (big ups to my husband; when the kids told him they learned about the lungs and breathing, he asked them about times that they got out of breath and how running around made them feel- I totally spaced on that angle, which has proven to be a great teaching tool that we can talk about all the time while playing!)

And the part of the project that was the most fun for the kids? Blowing up the lung balloon with the straw!

Resources:


A great pdf from the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, CA (one of my most beloved childhood hangouts)


The Breathing Machine (I used a variant of this for our project)

How the body works, animations for kids on general anatomy