What are some easy yet informative science projects my child can do?
I love experiments with plants, actually. I just did experiments with plants earlier, just because they take a long time. But, experiments with plants actually talk a lot life, and you can get little flowers from the nursery or grow little bean plants. But, you can give them vitamins drinks, you can give them coffee or coke. You can give them different kinds of chemicals or aspirin or Excedrin. There are all sorts of things that you can do – if you kind of want to see what kinds of affects these things have on people, you can use plants as a proxy. So, there's lots of questions that kids are interested in that you can do that with. Mold is really fun. Mold grows on bread and mold grows on fruit and mold grows fast and it's pretty, visually interesting. So, mold things are fun. I like electricity things – electricity things are fun for them to do. Magnet things are fun for them to do. And, none of them require a whole lot of expertise or a lot of tools. It just requires bread being left out on the counter or a battery and a light bulb to hook up together to do a circuit. There's a lot of things that we do. One is – under what condition does mold grow better? So, it could be wheat bread or white bread, it could be bread with jam versus bread without jam, or bread with peanut butter versus bread without peanut butter. But, you spread your different kinds of bread with your different kinds of condiments – you can use as many as you want. You want to have one that's plain. That's your control bread. And, you find a place and you lay them on the counter or you put them in the frig – or you, you know, you do whatever you do and you check them every day – every day you check them – and you take pictures of the mold and you record – you measure the mold spots or you count the mold spots. Your child does this – she has a piece of paper and she writes down how big the mold spots are or how many there are – and by the end of the experiment, she's got a whole record of a week, or two weeks, or three weeks of mold growing at different rates on these pieces of bread.
