30 Second Christmas Science - Electric Playdough, Christmas Lights

Remember the burned out finger lights I mentioned earlier? 

They weren't much good for making colored shadow puppets, but I figured as long as we had them out, we might as well tear them apart, and figure out what was wrong with them.

We tested the little LED's against the battery pack...

...from our Leapster, and discovered a number of them still worked.

Most of the little button batteries still worked too, so it must have just been that the plastic casings had become loose, and weren't holding everything together tightly enough.

No matter, because now we had a bunch of LEDs (light emitting diodes) loose, and ready to play with.  We just needed something to decorate...
 

...and as we just happened to have a can of green Play-doh handy, we formed a quick Christmas tree, cut it in half down the middle (if the two sides touch the lights won't work)...

...added our lights (all running the same polar direction,  + and - wise), and plugged the tree into the battery pack (DC power is safe for this, AC power would not be - I think) with insulated alligator clip leads (we keep a number of these on around...they're so handy), with the positive on one side, and negative on the other.

We also played around a little, adding a strip of plastic wrap to the center of our tree, so we could connect the two sides without turning off our lights (LEDs are very bright, by the way, you don't want to stare directly at them).

Then, the children started working on a Christmas wreath, creating a string of lights, and balls of Play-doh.  Very quickly, though, they ran into a voltage drop problem.  When they tried to string three lights together, the third would not light...

...even though they were able to light four together, when only using two balls of dough.

I imagine there's a lesson in Ohm's law in there somewhere, but I'll need to brush up on my high school physics before we tackle it together. 

However, with my mother flying in for a pre-Christmas visit this evening, and the gnome-bot still refusing to fold laundry, it will probably have to wait until after the holidays.

The really great, and terrible, thing about 30 second science experiments is they tend to lead directly into deeper study, that lasts a lot longer than half a minute.

30 Second Christmas Science - Light And Shadow

After driving around town to view Christmas lights, we came home inspired to explore, and play with light, and shadow.

The first thing we needed was a couple of green and red lights.  We have plenty of colored finger lights, but all of our greens were burned out, or had dead batteries, or a loose wire, or something...

...so we grabbed a flashlight, and colored the lenses with red and green washable markers, instead.  We used a flashlight that had a double light, but you could just as easily use two separate flashlights, one colored red and one colored green.  The washable marker wipes right off, with a dry cloth, when you're done.

When you shine a red, and green light, together, on a white wall (or in our case, the top of a white, washing machine), the light appears to be white, at least in the center.

But, an object held between the lights, and the wall will cast very Christmassy, red and green shadows - perfect for holiday themed shadow puppets.

Shining the red and green lights, together, down into a clear, glass bowl filled with water...

...produces a pattern of concentric circles, in an alternating red and green pattern, that flutes out, and changes when the water is disturbed.

And, shining the lights, together, through the sides of the bowl, creates a moving...

...shimmering...

...northern lights kind of effect on the wall, which I'm sure we would have explored further, had I not been alerted by the glowing green light behind the light show...

...that the washing machine was done, and ready for the next load.

Christmastime or not, laundry isn't going to do itself.

A Rainbow Shadow Room At Home

March is most definitely blowing into Montana like a lion. The snow was just beginning to fall this morning, when I noticed a robin, shivering in our tree. It's my first for the season, and I was very excited to see it.


The ground is now completely covered with snow, and the trees are full of starlings, flickers, finches, and even more robins, waiting out the storm. D (age 9), and I were so busy rushing from window to window, binoculars and bird books in hand, that I totally forgot about the rainbow breakfast smoothies I had planned for today.

Instead, while the muffins were baking, I set the children up with a fallback project, using little finger lights to turn our bathroom into a rainbow shadow room, like you might see at a children's museum.


I found the lights on Amazon, for about 18 cents a piece, and they worked perfectly for making rainbow shadows - at least the ones that would turn on. You get what you pay for, and these little lights are not only cheap, as in inexpensive, they are also cheap, as in poorly made, so you need to pick up about twice as many as you think you'll need, if you want to try this project.


I placed them in the bathroom, because that's one room in our house without a window, that can be made dark at any time of day, and because the shower curtain made a perfect screen for our shadows, but any dark room with a smooth, white, wall would work.


It's really difficult to photograph colored shadows in a dark room, but let me assure you, the effect is stunning. Not only could we produce the whole rainbow of colors with the shadows, but we had a lot of fun rearranging the lights, and turning one, or more off at a time, to see how it would change the colors of the shadows.


Working with colored light and shadow is very different than combining pigments in paints. In fact, the results of removing or adding a color are often the opposite of what you might expect - it's very counter intuitive, and quite entertaining, especially if you happen to be stuck inside on a blustery, Montana morning in March.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

The Eiffel Tower String Trick - Step by Step

I decided it would be fun to teach the younger girls how to do the Eiffel Tower string trick as a follow-up to our New Year's Eve pretzel tower (which I should say was as much fun to demolish and eat as it was to build).

Of course, before I could teach the girls how to make the tower out of string, I had to learn the trick myself.   Thankfully we're still on Christmas break, because it took me pretty well an entire day to successfully master the steps. 

I started out watching a YouTube video from WhyKnot.  Then, realizing the tower was really just Jacob's Ladder turned and pinched together, I switched over to YouTube instructions for Jacob's Ladder from MomsMinivan (love those names!). Still a little confused on a couple of the steps, I decided to search out some still pictures, the best of which I found in a string trick book on Slide and Share, except that with my hands wrapped in string, I kept advancing the page too far, and sliding right out of the directions I wanted.

Between the three, I did eventually master the figure elementary school children have been creating with ease on playgrounds around the country for years.  There's nothing like attempting a child's game for promoting humility.  Anyway, after all of that, I thought I'd add one more set of pictures and instructions to the mix, for all the visual learners like me.

The Eiffel Tower:

Start by draping a loop (made of string long enough to wrap two and a half times from your hand to your elbow) a across your palms as shown.

With the index finger of one hand, go under and hook the string running across the opposite palm with hands palm facing palm...

...and pull it back...

...then repeat the step with opposite hands...

...to form what is called an "open A".

Drop the string off of your thumbs...

Then take your thumbs...

Reach under all the strings, hook the last string and pull it back on your thumbs...

Then, reach over the nearest string on the pointer finger with your thumbs and under the farthest string on the pointer fingers...

...and pull that back too, giving you two strings looped on each thumb.

Next, drop the loops off of your pinkie fingers.

Use your pinkies to reach over the string nearest them, and under and into the loop around the thumb...

...and stretch your pinkies out with the string.

Drop the string off of your thumbs.  This makes the "Cat's Whiskers" by the way.

 Reach over the string wrapped around your pointer fingers with your thumbs, and under and into the loops on your pinkies...

...and pull your thumbs back with the string.

Being careful not to lose the loops on your fingers, use one hand to take the loop from the opposite pointer finger..

...and stretch it over the thumb of that same hand.

Then take the original loop (now on the bottom) from the thumb...

...and lift it over the loop shared with the pointer finger, and off the thumb.

Repeat the steps on the other hand...

This will create a triangle in front of each thumb. 

***The next steps are tricky, and need to be done in one fluid motion***

Bend your index fingers down into the triangles...

...drop the string off your pinkies...

...and turn your palms away from you.  Now you have Jacob's ladder.

Keeping your hands close enough together to keep the string loose (this is important), rotate the figure, and pinch your top pointer finger and thumb together to make a tower.

And, if you happened to be using glow-in-the-dark yarn, turn the lights off, for an illuminated, night time in Paris effect.

Bon courage!