Passing the Time

Summer is all about passing the downtime. Sure there are days with camp, swimming, playdates, and activities galore, but there are also those days when you are left to your own devices. Those days, in my memory, were filled with reruns of the The Brady Bunch and The Addams Family at times, but mostly they were filled with sprinklers, freeze tag, My Little Ponies, and trying to catch little bugs in the yard.  I decided this summer that my kids need those downtime days, with no planned activities. I was excited to see them explore the backyard, build sand castles and playdoh towers, and the ever-fun catching of bugs in the yard. Instead they opt for Netflix and LeapPads. When I take those electronic time suckers, the kids stare blankly at me for what to do. Me! The grown-up!

Today they sit for a good thirty minutes asking me what they are supposed to be doing. I reply, “Anything you want!” expecting them to squeal with delight, not say, “like what?” I point out the thousands of toy options available to them (no exaggeration, if you count up every Lego in the multiple hundred piece sets, Barbie dress, and puzzle piece in the house I have no doubt there are at least one thousand toys in our house).  Since “play” seems to be too big an option for them, I narrow it to “for one hour you have freetime to do what you want – but no tv or LeapPad”. They pull out a train set and put it together. They run some trains and Lightening McQueen cars around the track a time or two and then ask, “how many minutes was that?” After the third, “How many more minutes of free time” I decide that we can call it for today. They can both read the clock but I thought we could make a more fun way to tell time and avoid the mindless TV trap for a bit.

We are going to make an hourglass.

All you need: soda bottles (2 per hourglass), push pins (one per hourglass), a liquid (any will work), lots of patience.

Step 1: Wash out the bottles and lids.

Step 2: Tape two bottle lids back to back so that they do not slip or twist while you make the holes. If you use the lids you will have the advantage later of adding or removing liquids (or small solids like sand) as you’d like because they will easily screw on and off.

Step 3: Take the bottle lids and a pushpin and push the pin through, making multiple holes. (I did this step, vs letting the kids do it. You can use a small hand drill if you want, but a drill and little ones are not really compatible so I put in some elbow grease instead.) Leave the pin in the center for extra security if you’d like. I did and it worked well.

Step 3: Fill one of the bottles (we dyed the water pink with Crystal Light that we’ve had forever and never used so that we could see it better after playing with clear water for a while) and screw the lids onto it.

Step 4: Screw the second, empty, bottle upside down to the top of the other bottle lid. That’s it. You have an hourglass.

  

But wait, there’s one ingredient that you have that you haven’t used any of yet – lots of patience.

This is where the learning comes in.

First I let the kids watch the water drip through. We also swirled the water around to see a little tornado just for fun. Then I asked them how much time their bottles measured.

Abby’s Coke bottles (I had them use different bottles so that we’d know which hourglass belonged to who) took 47 minutes to empty.

  

Briana’s diet coke hourglass only took 27 minutes. It also leaked, making me wish I'd stuck to clear water. 

We tape it up more securely. We try putting different things in the bottle – syrup went really slowly compared to the water and olive oil looked the coolest (because of residual water). We didn’t do any solids but if you want to, just be sure to dry it out completely so it doesn’t cake.

Briana wants to see what would happen if the holes were bigger. Or she wants to watch Mommy swirl the push pins around to the point of frustration (it does take a decent amount of pressure to use the pins and my thumb was hurting by the end) to make the holes bigger, but in the end it works. We titrate until it measures a half hour pretty successfully. The girls were allowed to play on the LeapPads at the table while we waited.

Then the girls added twice as much water to Abby’s Coke hourglass as was in Bree’s, hypothesizing that twice as much water should take twice as long and that then we’d have an hourglass. It didn’t work – did you catch why already? Yep (just like Dora does, I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you got it right ;) ). We made the holes in Briana’s bigger so the water flowed more quickly. Abby’s took about an hour and a quarter.

Every so often for the rest of the day, we’d check and see if another hour had gone by. When the bottles were close to the timer on the microwave, the kiddies were ecstatic and I got “double high fives”. At each of the checks, we’d do a little math. How much water has gone through as a fraction – a half? A quarter? Then how much time has passed? A quarter of an hour means 15 minutes have passed. (They are preschoolers so we only did quarters of hours – quarter, half, three quarter, whole.) It’s good for them to get a visual handle on estimating volume displacement and they were pretty good at it.

Science and experimentation is always a good way to pass the time – and now they can tell how much of the hour has passed without nagging me J

<3 Pedigreed Housewife