Science week 2014

It's a tradition I started when my older kids were little and we look forward to it every year! Every summer we do a science week full of fun experiments!  This is out lesson plan for the week:

Monday we taught the littles all about rain clouds and how storms are formed.  We used dollar store shaving cream, a clear container filled with clear water and a small bowl filled with water I dyed blue which was our "rain".

We took turns dropping the rain onto our cloud with a dropper.  When the cloud was full of rain, the rain started to fall out of the cloud and formed a storm. Even my 3 year old was completely fascinated by watching our storm form!

Tuesday day 2: I bought a kit at Joann's to make a Tin Can robot.  This was super cool! It did however take quite a bit of time and the littles lost interest in the building portion fairly quick. But once it was built they loved it!!

Day 3: we made flubber!! The recipe was pretty simple.  All you need is:

2 bottles of Elmers Glue (equaling 1 cup)

1 cup of cold water 

Food coloring

Mix those together in 1 bowl.  Then in a second bowl add:

1 TBS of Borax Laundry Detergent

3/4 cup of warm water

Stir the contents of bowl 2 until the Borax is dissolved and then dump that into bowl 1. Mix until it's a rubber consistency.  

**Note** the glue I had on hand was not Elmer and I'm not sure but I think that may have caused it to be a little too sticky? Or I should have stired it longer. It was still fun either way! :)

Day 5: we skipped thursday because one of my sons had a day long birthday party to attend. On friday we did this cool water experiment.  We had 3 cups. 2 were filled halfway with either yellow dye water or blue dyed water. The middle cup was empty. We added a paper towel from the blue cup up and into the middle empty cup & did the same with the yellow. By the end of the day the 2 have combined into the middle cup to make green water!! Honestly this one took a long time to work but it was so worth the wait!! 

Chalkboard homework table tutorial

This is a great idea for a back to school project!

Let me start out by saying that I bought this little side table at Ikea a few years back for $7.  It was cheap and I really had no specific perpose for it at the time but over the years it has become where my little ones eat, craft and play games.  It's safe to say it has taken a beating and up close it looks pretty bad.  But hey! It was $7!!!! 

I cleaned the table up then sanded down any rough edges.  In hindsight I should have probably sanded the entire top because it was a shiny white laquar.  Once it was clean. I removed the links from the top.

  I took the top outside and using chalkboard spray paint I did 2 thick coats.  Once it was dry I put the legs back on and it was done!

Now it's ready to be scribbled all over!! My son can use it when he does his homework and we can save on scratch paper because he can do his math problems right on the table!! It's also going to come in handy on game nights as we can use it to keep score!!

There you have it...within hours a perfectly new looking homework station/game table completely redone!!