Moving Molecules - 30 Second Science

We really did this more as a boredom buster, than a science project today, but it is an easy way to demonstrate the idea, that water molecules speed up, or slow down, according to their temperature.

What you need:

• 3 glass jars - one filled with very cold water, one filled with room temperature water, and one filled with boiling hot water.
• Water soluble food coloring.
  

Fill the three glasses with the various temperatures of water.

Very quickly add a couple of drops of food coloring to each jar.

Watch to see how long it takes the food coloring to mix with the water in each glass. Because the water molecules will be moving faster in the hot water, the food coloring should mix faster, too.

As a bonus, give your kids some paper, and paint brushes, and move smoothly from science to art.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Quick and Easy Boredom Busters - PopTart Wrapper Races and Paper Dolls

Our thermometer is reading 23 degrees Fahrenheit this morning, and we woke up to another dusting of snow. That's the last time I trust a groundhog predicting an early spring.

Needless to say, with cold grey clouds outside, and six children trapped inside, I'm scrambling today, for some simple, easy boredom busters. And, not that I'm promoting PopTarts for breakfast (just because we have terrible habits, doesn't mean you should!), but if you're going to eat them anyway, don't miss out on the excellent potential of their packaging.

Not only are the boxes covered in terrific "paper" dolls, and accessories, just waiting to be cut out, and played with...


...but the light weight, foil wrappers, are perfect for racing across the floor. Just cut them into squares, with different pictures on each, so you can tell them apart.

Add a masking tape finish line.

Give each participant a straw, and a foil square.

And, let the races begin! Really, the straws, and finish line are completely optional.

I know we used to buy toys for the children - but I can't remember why.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Bread Dolls

We made bread dolls for lunch today, using the bread recipe from the back of Tomie dePaola's Watch Out for Chicken Feet in Your Soup. At least, we used the recipe to make the bread dough - we modeled our dolls after some we saw on Village Feast.

DePaola's recipe is intended for the more traditional, braided, Easter bread babies, with an egg baked into the bread, for a face - like these, from Sprinkle Bakes. It is the type of bread doll depicted in the dePaola's story, about a little boy taking his friend to visit his Italian grandmother. However, the recipe only provides enough dough for one doll of that type, and we needed seven for lunch.

So, after mixing, kneading, and allowing dePaola's sweet, cinnamon dough to rise, then punching it down, and letting it rest, we divided it into seven potato shaped ovals, with eight bits left over.

We pinched up a rough head shape, and cut three slits, to make arms and legs, in each oval.

Then we rolled seven of the bits into ropes, to wrap around the heads, like scarves.

Finally, we used the last bit to make some tiny ropes for mouths, and poked deep eye holes, with a tooth pick.

We covered the dolls, and let them rise another twenty minutes, and then baked them at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, still covered, for 20 minutes. After that, we reduced the oven temperature to 225 degrees Fahrenheit, and let the dolls bake an additional 10 minutes, uncovered for the last five.

The children were pretty pleased with their lunchtime treat. The dough is sweet, but not too sweet, and is quite good with fruit, cheese, and honey.

Oh, and if you're curious about dePaula's recipe, you can find it online, here, at a story activity page from the Bennington Free Library.

Or, if your just interested in bread making projects in general, you might check out the Unplugged Project page at Unplug Your Kids, where the theme this month is bread.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Piggy's Polka-Dot Cake - A Cake All For Me!

My oldest son (I think from now on I'll refer to him as T, to make things easier on myself), treated us to Piggy's Polka-Dot Cake with Piggy's Choc-O-Lot Frosting. Both were made following the recipes at the back of Karen Magnuson Beil's A Cake All For Me!

The book, a math book about measurements, is far too easy for T's 12 years, but he was extremely interested to find out how a cake with chopped apple, grated orange peel, and chocolate chips would taste.

We rearranged the mixing order, so as to only dirty one mixing bowl. The recipe follows the rhyming text of the story, which has Piggy creaming butter, beating eggs, and sifting dry ingredients in separate bowls - a little more of a mess than I wanted T to make.

We were pretty pleased with the cake, but the frosting was another matter. It turned out thick, fudgy, and extremely sweet. And, there wasn't quite enough of it to comfortably frost the 9''x13'' cake. Not to mention the fact, that it called for using a double boiler, which I thought was kind of complicated for a children's book recipe.

The story ends with a group of Piggy's friends arriving just in time to help him eat the cake. At first Piggy protests, but then divides the cake to share with everyone. In keeping with the math theme of the book, T divided his cake, first in half, then in fourths, eighths, and finally sixteenths.

As Piggy says, "A cake all for me would be easy to slice. But a cake shared with friends tastes mighty nice."

It's great to be a homeschooler.

The Science Chef - Popping Corn

We found Joan D'Amico and Karn Eich Drummond's The Science Chef: 100 Fun Food Experiments and Recipes for Kids, this week, at the library. It's basically a child friendly cookbook, with science lessons thrown in, answering questions like: Why do onions make you cry? How does yeast make bread rise? And, what makes popcorn pop?

Note to my regular readers: We do do more than eat at our house. But, since we have to eat sometime anyway, I figure it might as well tie into a lesson. I take a similar view of television, music, video game, and family fun time, too - I just don't always write about those.

So, remember when I mentioned we were going to watch Liberty's Kids in our pajamas, with some popcorn?

Of course, we needed to find out what makes it pop! We learned from The Science Chef, that popping corn is a special type of corn, with a drop of water inside of each kernel. When the kernel is heated, the water expands, and turns to steam, bursting through the outer shell, producing popcorn.

To check this out, we popped three batches of popcorn, according to the experiment instructions in the book. Before we popped the kernels, we put one batch into the oven at 200 degrees Fahrenheit, for one hour.

We sat one batch aside, and put the final batch into a cup of water, to soak for an hour. When the hour was up, we drained the water off, and toweled off the kernels, and removed the first batch from the oven. Then, we popped the corn.

The idea is that the kernels soaked in water, will have absorbed some, and will pop bigger, and with fewer duds, while the kernels dried out in the oven, will pop smaller, and not as well as the batch that had nothing done to it.

The results weren't stunningly obvious, but upon inspection, it did seem to be true. We also noticed, that the water soaked kernels made for chewier popcorn.

After each experiment in the book, is a series of recipes, to help in using up the ingredients from the experiments. We tried out "Cheddar Cheese and Chive Popcorn", which was pretty good, but won't be taking the place of Peanut Butter Popcorn at the top of our favorites list, any time soon.

For more fun with science check out this week's Science Sunday link up, at Adventures in Mommydom.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

More "Homemade" Easy Bake Oven Recipes

The girls have been baking up a storm with their Easy Bake Oven this week, using up some of the Duncan Hines white cake mix, I repackaged into individual servings, for them (you can read about that - here).

Here are three cakes, using two packages each, with slight modifications, or add-ins, that the girls particularly liked.

Rainbow Swirl Cake

6 tablespoons of white or yellow cake mix (any brand)

2 tablespoons of water

Red, yellow, and blue food coloring

2 greased easy bake oven pans (we found Pam cooking spray, worked better than shortening)

Frosting (see recipe below)

In a cereal sized bowl, mix together the cake mix, and water, until smooth.

Divide the batter evenly into six bowls.

Add one, or two drops of food coloring to the bowls, according to the colors of the rainbow.

Fill the two baking pans with half each of the cake batter, starting with a blop of red, then orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.

Spread the batter evenly in the pans, with a quick swirling motion, with the back of a spoon.

Bake each cake for 12 minutes, in a preheated Easy Bake Oven.

Remove cakes from pans, allow to cool, and frost with butter cream frosting.

Butter Cream Frosting

Mix together 1/4 cup powdered sugar, 3/4 tablespoons softened butter, and 1/4 teaspoon milk.

Outrageous Orange Tea Cake

6 tablespoons white or yellow cake mix

2 1/4 tablespoons milk

1/4 teaspoon unsweetened orange Kool-Aid mix

Orange sugar to sprinkle over the top (1 tablespoon sugar, with 1 drop of red, and one drop of yellow food coloring, stir to remove clumps, allow to dry)

Sugar glaze frosting (just thin the frosting above, with a touch more milk)

2 greased, Easy Bake Oven cake pans

Mix the cake mix, and Kool-Aid together, and then stir in the milk, until there are no clumps.

Spread the batter evenly in the two greased pans.

Bake each cake for 10 minutes in a preheated Easy Bake Oven.

Frost, and sprinkle with your colored sugar.

Note: This cake is extremely orange tasting. My children loved it, but to my taste, I would say you could easily cut the Kool-aid added, down to 1/16 teaspoon.

Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Peanut Butter Frosting

6 tablespoons of white or yellow cake mix

2 tablespoons of water or milk

1/2 teaspoon unsweetened, baker's cocoa

2 greased Easy Bake cake pans

Chocolate Peanut Butter Frosting (see recipe below)

Mix the cake mix, and cocoa together in a cereal bowl. Stir in the milk, or water (milk might taste a little better, but water gives a fluffier texture, and is easier for younger children to measure out on their own).

Spread the batter evenly in the cake pans.

Bake each cake for 12 minutes.

Remove cakes from the pans, immediately after baking, and allow a couple of minutes to cool.

Frost, as normal for a large cake.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Frosting

Cream together 1 tablespoon chunky, or creamy peanut butter, 1/4 cup of powdered sugar, and 1/4 teaspoon of milk. Add additional milk, 1/4 teaspoon at a time, until you have the thickness you desire.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

What My Child is Reading - May 1, 2010

We ended up with four books from the library this week, that all have recipes at the back. Can you imagine our dilemma? I'm hoping to share each of them separately, over the next week.

They are all totally different types, and styles of stories, but they all have interesting titles, that drew us in, like Tomie dePaola's Watch Out For Chicken Feet In Your Soup. I was also attracted by dePaola's illustrations. They remind me vaguely of cartoons from the '70s. And, the recipe for a bread doll, is one we're anxious to try.


My father's favorite aunt was named Edna, so Ethel Footman Smother's title, was a must read, for me. It would actually be perfect for one of those "no T.V." weeks, as it is about old fashioned fun, like button spinners, paper bag curlers, and baking together, in a house without a television (gasp!).


Apple Batter, by Deborah Turney Zagwyn, was a bigger hit with the children, than with me. I found the illustrations ugly, and disturbing. But, the children enjoyed the story of a boy, determined to improve his swing, and his mother, determined to finally harvest an apple off her trees. It not only includes a recipe, but also a series of baseball tips, and more information than I thought possible, about caring for apple trees in your yard.

Finally, A Cake All For Me! by Karn Magnuson Beil, is a math story for younger children. I'm not in love with the story, but the children have all taken their turns looking through it, and enjoying it. It does provide a nice list of measurements, such as how many teaspoons make a tablespoon, or how many pints are in a quart. And really, who could resist such a title!

I'm sure after all the Easy Bake Oven cakes, the girls have been whipping up, and devouring this week, the cake recipe at the back of Beil's book, will be the first the boys will want to pursue. I'm a little torn, though, they all look quite interesting, and yummy.

You can find more children's book recommendations and reviews at the What My Child Is Reading blog hop, hosted by Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns.

It's great to be a homeschooler.