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We always try to eat together as a family at our dining room table. Some days the dinner conversations are more interesting than others and one time we ended up talking about the topic of outer space. We explained to the kids that things float around in space due to the low-gravity environment and that if we were eating in space the food would float around.

Our table conversation must have made an impression. The next week my daughter's teacher presented the class with a science experiment - a floating paper clip. She asked the class to form a hypothesis about why the paper clip floats. My daughter answered "no gravity." Well, her hypothesis was incorrect, but I was surprised and pleased that she took something away from our conversation. She was so excited about her school science experiment that she asked if we could repeat it at home. It's a simple experiment to perform and kept the kids occupied for some time.

How does Santa fly through the sky? We really don't know. But, we had fun making a miniature Santa and his reindeer fly. We added a little holiday twist to the floating paper clip experiment by attaching an image of Santa and his reindeer to the paper clip with some tape.

Flying Santa Floating Paper Clip Experiment

Scientific principles and topics:
Magnetic forces
metals vs. other materials

Materials:
Paperclip
Light string
Tape
Magnet
Paper Santa image (optional)





Procedure:
Tie the paper clip to a piece of string and tape the other end of the string to a table.

Hold the paper clip up. Position the magnet above it so the magnet and paperclip are close, but not touching. Let go of the paper clip. The paper clip should float.

Explanation:
The magnetic force travels through the air, attracting and suspending the metal paper clip so that it floats in mid-air.

Thoughts:
This is a nice beginner experiment for helping children understand magnetic fields. Our kids enjoyed making the paper clip float as if by magic and loved making Santa fly. My daughter decided she wanted to make a snowflake dance and drew a snowflake to attach to a paperclip. My son found out that his Thomas the Train engine has magnets on the ends and discovered those magnets were strong enough that he could make the engine hang from the end of the paperclip attached by tape to the counter. We also talked about how magnetic fields can go through materials like paper (demonstrate by hanging a piece of paper on the refrigerator with a magnet). We used ordinary circle shaped magnets for our experiment, but since the kids liked this so much, we're considering buying some stronger, scientific magnets with clearly labeled poles, so that we can conduct more experiments using magnets.

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This spring, Great-Grandpa planted numerous pumpkin seeds in the garden. They took over his garden! The kids were able to watch the plants grow, see the pumpkins form and watch them turn from green to orange. When the vines started to dry out we picked a few pumpkins to take home.



Our science studies this week revolved around pumpkins. We even threw in a little math for fun! First we learned about the life cycle of a pumpkin. We read a couple of books on the subject:

Pumpkin Circle: The Story of a Garden by George Levenson, photographs by Shmuel Thaler
Mystery Vine by Cathryn Falwell

We also discussed how two years ago Grandma left her jack-o-lantern outside to decompose in her flower bed. The next year a pumpkin vine grew from the rotten pumpkin. She must have left a few seeds behind when she cleaned it before carving! The book Pumpkin Circle mentions decomposition, too. My daughter told us that she learned in school that a pumpkin is a fruit.

We examined the inside of a pumpkin. Both kids like touching and pulling out the inside mass of string and seeds.



Every year our family carves pumpkins, but we've never tried counting the seeds inside. This year we were inspired by the book How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin? by Margaret McNamara and G. Brian Karas. We picked two pumpkins to compare, a small and large one. We estimated how many seeds were inside. My daughter thought the big one would have 120. I thought around 350. We were both wrong. My daughter and I grouped the seeds from the small pumpkin into piles of 10 seeds. Daddy grouped the big pumpkin seeds into piles of 100 seeds. (My son tried to help with this, but he kept messing up the piles. We gave him a spoon and the pumpkin insides to play with and he happily transferred the mush into the pumpkins and back out during our counting period.) After counting we discovered that the large one contained 696 seeds. The small one contained 360 seeds. In McNamara's book the smallest pumpkin has the most seeds, unlike our result.

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Why is blood red? What is in it? Every kid that has scraped their knee or cut their finger will probably want to know more about blood. Even little kids want to learn the facts about their bodies and what goes on inside.

This past week my whole family has been fighting a nasty cold/virus that turned into pneumonia. I thought this was a good time to discuss our body's defense mechanisms and specifically talk a little bit about blood. Plus, its getting closer to Halloween and I thought it might be helpful to also discuss real vs. pretend in case the kids accidentally see something frightening like a blood thirsty vampire. So our science Sunday fun revolved around blood today - real and fake.

My daughter has already learned a little about anatomy in her health class including the basics about her heart. We expanded a little on this and studied a diagram of the circulation system and blood vessels. Texas Heart Institute has a wonderful online website, Project Heart, that includes pdf diagrams for kids of all things related to the circulatory system. http://www.texasheart.org/hic/projH/circulatorysystem.cfm

We learned about the make up of blood and especially concentrated on white blood cells because they help fight infection.
- Red Blood Cells: carry hemoglobin that delivers oxygen
- White Blood Cells: fight infection
- Platelets: help blood clot

- Plasma: yellowish liquid that carries the blood cells, nutrients and waste

We viewed this neat image showing the above components:
http://www.texasheart.org/HIC/ProjH/upload/Circ_Blood.pdf
And, we watched this animated gif showing the blood circulate:
http://www.texasheart.org/HIC/ProjH/images/vesselanimation.gif

FAKE BLOOD EXPERIMENT

After learning all about blood we made some fake blood using a recipe we found in The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Gross Junior Edition. While this recipe is not available online, several Fake Blood Recipes can be found at Steve Spangler Science.

Scientific Principles:
Measurement
Color Mixing
Consistency

Materials we used: Mug, cocoa powder, warm water, corn syrup, red food coloring, old cotton t-shirt

Our thoughts:
While my kids thought it was fun to mix up all the ingredients and stir the fake blood, they didn't want to touch it at all or taste it (it's edible). We all expected the concoction to look more red. Our mixture had a really muddy brown color in the mug and didn't look like blood at all until we took it out of the mug and put some on our cotton cloth. The kids also commented that the fake blood smelled like chocolate Pop Tarts - it really does! We talked about the differences between fake blood and real blood and talked about instances when people might use fake blood. If my kids were older, I'd probably talk a little about blood types or try out some of the other recipes to see which looks the most realistic. They really enjoyed this simple and easy to conduct kitchen science experiment.

6 Comments on All About Blood & Fake Blood Experiment for Kids - Science Sunday, last added: 10/27/2010