These two pretty much happened concurrently and again, almost completely naturally. In fact, it had actually come up shortly before I even found BFSU. Meredith had noticed we don’t fill the tub all the way before we get in, and asked why. We explained that we are pretty big and when we get in the water a lot of it will be displaced and the level of the water will rise. She made her own experiment, first in the bath holding her finger where the water level is and placing different objects in, and then another day using a bowl and trying out different objects.
When it came up the second time (with the bowl, and I had read parts of BFSU at that point), we discussed a bit more about why that happens and the differences between solids, liquids, and gases. We have done experiments with empty glasses turned upside down in bowls of water in the past, so she was pretty confident air is in fact real and does take up space. We tried an experiment from one of the books we had read where we put paper towel in a glass and put it in a bowl of water and the paper towel is still dry. Then we put it back in but tilted the cup and watched the air bubble up, and of course the paper towel was soaking wet at that point.
We talked about how things change state (temperature) and Meredith did quite a few experiments she either made up on her own, or that she had seen in books or videos. We made oobleck which the girls thought was pretty darn cool. I just made it for them and then left them to play with it on their own while I read nearby. It was neat to hear Meredith trying to give Fiona a science lesson about it, and pointing out how it changed from solid to liquid and back again. Note that most of this happened in the space of a week or two, as she asked questions or wanted to do experiments or just said she was bored and we would start discussing it.
When I asked her if she thought gases weighed anything, she thought for a moment and then decided that no, gases don’t weigh anything. We discussed how to test this, and eventually I brought up balloons since it is something she had pointed out when talking about whether air was real and took up space. We weighed a balloon on our scale, then she blew it up and we weighed it again. She was pretty delighted to see that it was in fact heavier full of air! We then blew up a balloon with baking soda and vinegar, which produces carbon dioxide which will fill a balloon. The balloons were very similar in size so she wanted to weigh the one with carbon dioxide one too, and we discovered that straight carbon dioxide is heavier than air. Not super scientific, I know, but the CO2 balloon was actually a tad smaller than the one filled with air but still heavier, plus I know it is true, so it was good enough for me. Later as they were batting balloons around in the air, she noticed that it was much harder to keep the CO2 one up in the air and came to the conclusion it must be because CO2 is heavier than air. She was very excited to announce her findings about that to me!
At this point my goal is mostly just for her to have fun and develop a love of learning and asking questions. It seems to be working so far, so I am definitely going to keep going with it. Sometimes maybe quite slowly, other times we might move quickly, but as long as she is still having fun and asking questions and designing her own experiments to figure out the answers, I will consider it a success and keep going. I think I have mentioned before that she asks almost daily to do an experiment, so it’s nice to have some direction and new ideas, rather than just trying to google or think up cool ones we haven’t done yet!
I think next I will move on to A4 because it seems to follow this one quite naturally, plus her and Fiona would probably love the game he suggests (pretending to be particles of matter in different states). Then, who knows. We will see where her questions take us. If I can find a globe, I think the D track as gravity and the cycles of day/night have come up a few times recently too.
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