Science Ed

Practice colour theory. What are your child’s favourite colours? How can you mix new colours? What colour is cooking oil and what colour is water?

Phase 1: Material

• Disposable plates
• Household paint
• Glass jars
• Pipettes
• Cooking oil

Phase 2: Activity

Pour cooking oil into a disposable plate. Mix food colouring powder with water in glass jars to get different colours or use ready-made food colouring products. Start pipetting one food colouring at a time onto the cooking oil. Try to make small droplets. What’s going on? Does the oil and paint mix? The drops? Let’s try different colours and different sizes of drops. What happens if you put two colours on top of each other?

You get drop art. We recommend taking pictures of the teardrop art with iPads.

Finally, try mixing all the paint drops together with the pipette tip as a mixing aid? What happens then? Do you get the drops to mix with the oil or with each other?

Phase 3: Why?

Oil and water do not mix with each other since they have different chemical bonds.

This science experiment is also suitable for the youngest in early childhood education.

This idea come from STEAM Turku

Make a map, it can be real ,it can be fake.

Use it to count, recognise shapes, colours or various items.

In this way you combine the decoding of the map with math and concept understanding.

I have a sample map (PDF, 159 kB) (with questions) if you want one.

Try going on a sound walk.

See if you can fill the board.

What do you hear outside (pdf, 673 kB)

Idea from Buggy and Buddy

What do the concepts mean more, less and as much? What about bigger and smaller? Can it be investigated experimentally?

For example, you can drink water up a glass and consider whether two glasses of water is more or less than one glass of water. What happens if everyone drinks two glasses of water? Does one then drink more or less than the other? Or does everyone drink the same amount?

You can also compare two water glasses of different sizes. Which is the biggest and which is smaller?

Step 1 Materials

• Water
• Measuring cup
• Containers of different sizes and shapes (narrow, high, low…)

Step 2 Operation

We put all the containers on the table. Let’s think about which container holds the most water? Measure how much water the children think can fit in the largest container.

Try and see if this amount of water can fit in any other container. Measure how much water the children think can fit in the smallest container. How many times does this amount of water fit in the largest container to fill it?

What about other containers? Consider if there are any containers that are different in shape but can hold the same amount of water. For example, fill two containers to be examined with water to the brim. Then a measuring glass is taken, the water from another container is poured into it and the amount is read. Empty the measuring container, pour water from the remaining container into the measuring container and read the amount. Compare these numbers.

Step 3: Why

The amount of water can be used to observe the concept of volume. Volume is all the space left inside the edges of the container. The volume can be very small, even if the container is large. On the other hand, the volume can be large, even if the container is shallow.