Pedigreed Housewife World

I flew to a girl’s weekend last week and since then the kids have been asking a lot of questions about flight.  In fact they’ve been begging for a “flying experiment”.  Today we’re “finally” going to talk about how things fly in the air. When the kids get up from their naps they refuse their usual snack and half hour of tv to get straight to the experiment.  I love the enthusiasm.  Since I know that they have been thinking about flying for a while now, I asked them why they think a plane stays up in the air.  “Because that’s what flying means” Briana tries.  I hand them foam airplanes (courtesy of Arby’s happy meals from some time ago) to get them thinking about the parts of the planes.  Then I ask again the question in a more specific way – What PART of the plane keeps it up in the air?  Briana looks down at the plane in her hands and says “The Wings!” Abby is playing with her plane already and saying, “flap flap” as she flies her...

So I can’t take credit for today’s activity.  My kids are hooked on a tv show called Sid the Science Kid and after each episode they insist that we repeat the experiment ourselves.  I thought I’d share this one because the kids have been talking about it non-stop all week. Sid was teaching the kids about smell and how the molecules travel through the air and into our noses and that’s how we smell things.  The nice thing about following Sid is that the kids have already learned the basics, so we can just have fun with it.  Today we’re doing a smell test to see if the molecules from different foods can travel up to our noses and tell us what the food is without seeing it. I had mini potting cups leftover from when we planted our herbs, strawberries, and tomatoes on Earth day so I decided to use those.  Into each one I placed a different item – garlic (which replaced cinnamon in round 1), coffee grounds, chocolate, peanut butter, and grapefruit. ...