Yesterday we did a number of experiments from the general science Discovery Tube given to F by her Grandma Julia a few weeks ago. We copper plated a nail using copper coins, salt and vinegar. We mixed bicarbonate of soda with vinegar and red food colouring and were amazed at how high up in the pint glass it went - from about a centimetre of liquid and solid up to nearly the top - talked about how the mixture is expanded by gas bubbles, made me think of fractally dimensioned things. Will definitely do it again maybe with different colours and see if we can guess how far it will go up the glass, or experiment with different amounts of both ingredients. We did the surface tension experiment with matches in a ring on water and poking a corner of bar of soap in and seeing how the matches all moved away from it. We rubbed a balloon on our clothes and then saw it picking up lots of tiny little polystyrene balls. And we repeated the balloon helicopter from the gravity Discovery Tube. And most of all we talked - about which experiment to do, what we needed to get to do it, what we thought might happen, what did happen, why, what we noticed. At one point F made an observation that was to do with her imaginary worlds and I thought that a year ago I might have been irritated that she hadn't been in 'science' mode, that she had made a comment that was far adrift from the 'purpose' of the experiment, and many teachers teaching in schools would be similarly irritated, and would not have the time anyway to be able to let children go off at a tangent. There is a set of rules for most pedestrian encounters with science - Don't bring your imagination to this, don't bring your whole self, focus in narrowly, ignore any beauty in it or other things it makes you think of outside the official domain of science, come to this task as your most narrow, restricted self, fit the experiment into a theory and ignore anything that doesn't fit with that. And yet most great discoveries are down to people thinking outside the box, observing things that aren't explained, finding unlikely, intriguing, imaginative and meaningful similarities between phenomena, etc. The best conversations I have with F are those where we go off down her path, with open questions, with interest and understanding on my part, where I relinquish any 'aim' or 'purpose' and of course cease to even slightly or gently manipulate her to any 'right' answer or 'logical' conclusion or 'scientific' deduction. Takes some doing sometimes though!
And having said all that, I am still sooooo glad that she is now old enough to be able to sit and wait while I read the instructions. And she even helped to clear up.
Other than that she XBoxed and tellied and went on the swing and danced around the room and did a bit of drawing.
At bedtime she drew another chapter of her story, The Magic Heart, while I read some Olga da Polga.
Today - F watched a bit of Class TV and that led to discussions of weather phenomena in quite a bit of detail - she very much liked the look of tornadoes until she heard that they could pick up buses. She played with her Leapfrog Globe quite a bit, making various statements of vaguely geographical intent and then I showed her Google Earth again and she wandered around on that for a while. She was mainly interested in Antarctica today.
We also watched a bit of ROAR and she went on the CBBC website and set up her own zoo with giraffes, red river hogs and maltese pythons (I think), choosing their food and treats and seeing if they were happy and how many visitors they had. She then played Beat the Boss, designing various bicycles for various customers and sometimes managing to beat the boss. We also had a couple of conversations about sign language at some point.
I'm feeling slightly under the weather and the deadline on my large job has been extended by a week so I'm not going to work again until Sunday night I think. Slightly peeved about the deadline as I could have taken more of the work - it's a 100,000 word job and I would have committed to half of it if I'd known, rather than a quarterish. When you're paid by the word, they all count! Still, there seems to be plenty around, picking up again now.
Off to MonsterTeeny Towers tomorrow, which will be good. On Saturday morning I'm taking F to a local drama group to see if she is ready for such a thing and likes it (free trial). Think the rest of the weekend is unplanned.
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