I can’t believe that I didn’t do anything with Mouse Paint last year!!  I came back to my blog and searched and searched sure that I had at least showed the book to the children and I couldn’t find a thing…which ended up being a good thing to get me back into “school” mode.  I had to create activities that would fit into Math, Science, and Language Arts.  I’ll be sharing them over the next couple of days, but I wanted to share what we did in Science today…

Our teams’ original idea was to use clear hair gel, mix in two colors of food coloring and let the kids squish the bags…no dice on the hair gel.  When I went shopping to get some for everyone, the store had every color except clear!!  I looked down one shelf and saw Suave Shampoo and Conditioner, coconut scented!  It was cheaper too!  So, 10 bottles of Suave later and some food coloring, here we are!

I placed a large “glob” of conditioner into a sandwich sized baggie and inserted that into a quart size FREEZER baggie (they are thicker!).  After explaining to the children that they could choose two colors from red, yellow, and blue, I walked around and asked each child what two colors that they would like to have in their sandwich baggie.  I then sealed the baggies shut and the children went to town squishing and squashing the baggies until something happened!  We all made green, orange, and purple!

As a class, we then wrote about our results and tallied up what color each person came up with.  I’ll post pictures, when I remember to take some! 🙂

I also purchased those water bottle ice cube trays from the Dollar Tree (2 for $1) and we made colored ice cubes.  Two trays were blue, two were red, and two were yellow.  In the freezer they went.  Tomorrow, we will give two to each of the children and let them watch them melt.  Last year I did this, and learned that it was best to fill them in the AM and they would be slightly frozen later in the day (about 3-4 hours later) and they would melt faster.  They were also a little more difficult to get out of the trays.  I’ll also take pictures of that! 🙂

Two pretty inexpensive Science experiments to get kids on the path to Inquiry!  We’re taking baby steps now!  Later in the year, full throttle! 🙂

Kristen 🙂