Marching into March

by Florence B.

Wow, time sure is flying by fast! How is it March already? Well, if you haven’t registered for a spot for the 2018-2019 school year, make sure you reserve your spot soon! Registration is now open for everyone, so please let your friends know it’s time to get excited about getting a spot for one of next year’s classes!

By now, I’m sure everyone has seen the amazing dramatic play area (and if you haven’t, don’t worry, I have some pictures)! Ok, let’s just say that the curriculum team deserves a medal for all their designs, and this one is definitely one of my favorites! Ready to fly the open skies? Welcome to the BFCP Airport! Where should we go today?

The pictures don’t do justice to how cute this set up is! I love all the little details that the curriculum team included. There are little luggage tags on the luggage, a pet carrier to take a pet on the flight, and a metal detector that actually swings so the kiddos can put it where they want for just a few examples! I got a huge kick out of the flight control panel. Did you notice the calculators attached to the wall?! How can you not fall in luuuurve with this setup?! Oh, and I have another reason for you as to why being part of a Co-Op is awesome—the 3/4 and PreK classes got to meet an Alaskan Airlines pilot and hear about his job! How are Co-Ops and pilots connected? Well, that awesome AA pilot is also one of our awesome PreK dads!

You’ll also see plenty of “Things that Go” books along with plenty of flying in the sky books, but let’s give a special call out to our author of the month: Donald Crews! My kids absolutely love his Freight Train book, which is also one of the 1979 Caldecott Honors books. That’s right, 1979! I guess it’s pretty timeless since kids still love this book almost 40 years later (and since it still hits top lists like New York Public Library’s “100 Great Children’s Books | 100 Years” at https://www.nypl.org/childrens100, I guess adults love this book, too!)? Anyway, it’s hard to describe this simple book, so just check it (and the rest of Donald Crew’s books) out, and be amazed when your kiddo is highly entertained by it!

Other themes you’ll see during March are Jobs that People Do, Wind and Weather, and Rainbows! The rainbow one will be sooo much fun since this is also interactive! The 3/4 and PreK classes will be “eating the rainbow” during the week of March 12th! Kiddos will bring one piece of whole fruit to share with the class, and then the PreK class will go even further by creating a graph of all the different fruits brought to class (go go early math!). On March 14th, it’ll be rainbow day for the older 2 classes, which means wearing rainbow colors to school! On March 16, the 2/3 class will have “Green Day,” so don’t forget to wear something green to school!

Well, I talked about the rainbow and the color green, how about the color red?! As in Fire Station red!! I’m so excited for this: this month, the toddlers and 2/3 classes are going to…wait for it…wait for it… are you ready for it…FIRE STATION 51 in Kenmore!!! Oh, there are just not enough exclamation marks in the world for this excursion!

*Phew* well, we have so may wonderful things going on during school, how about after school for our evening parent ed? On March 21, get ready for our our PAC All Schools Speaker: Julietta Skoog! This will be held in the Shoreline Community College Theater, and she’ll discuss Positive Discipline! You can check her out at her website here.

Here’s a quick quote from her website: “Learn to discipline with firmness and kindness, have fun as a parent, and set the foundation for important social and life skills.”

Well, I hope you’re enjoying March so far and looking forward to some fun and interesting topics ahead for you! If you have any feedback or thoughts to share, feel free to comment below or email me at blog@bothellfamilycoop.org!

Kitchen Science

by Florence B.

We’re half-way through the mid-winter break, and I hope you’re having fun trying new things and revisiting the old ones! For this mid-month blog post, I decided to do kind of a second part to my mid-Nov blog post “Playing with Your Food” and continue with “Kitchen Science!” Let’s face it, whenever educators talk about STEM, high-level science experiments, computer science activities, and other other high-level engineering topics are probably the first things that come to mind. Well, STEM fun at home doesn’t have to be all about expensive science kits that get mailed to you; you can have science fun with stuff you find in your kitchen!

There are tons of fun kitchen science ideas you can find online or in books, but here are some of my favorite experiments for little ones to get you started! The best thing about kitchen science is that it’s so adaptable! You can adjust depending on the level of what your kids can do, and for many of the experiments you can change ingredients depending on what you’ve got lying around in your cupboards. So, shall we get started? Here are five easy and fun kitchen science experiments!

A) Sink or Float with Orange Buoyancy:

Let’s start with a surprisingly fun kitchen experiment where all you need is water and some delicious citrus fruit that’s pretty much a staple in any household with a kid! Get ready to play some ‘sink or float’! This one is great for our smallest friends, because a) it’s water play and b) a clementine/mandarin/orange is involved!

For this experiment, it’s pretty simple: do you think the orange will float in the water? Let your kiddo make a hypothesis (or gnaw on the fruit depending on age) and then put it in a container of water and watch your citrus sail the high seas (or container, whatever). Next, let your little one peel the orange and then put that orange in the water and watch that peeled anchor sink!

“Wait!” your kiddo asks. “What’s the deal with that?!”

“Well,” you say with a knowing smile. “The peel is the orange’s floatie, just like floaties help you swim in the pool. Since we took off the floatie, the orange sinks.”

“Ah, what a wise parent. You know so much,” you wish they would say, but let’s face it, this dialog is fantasy.

Well, you can pretty much stop here, because you have an unpeeled orange, a peeled one, plenty of peelings, and a container of water that your kiddo can play with. But…if you’d like even more of a challenge for older kids, here comes the even more fun experimentation part! Can your kiddo peel *just enough* for buoyancy and gravity to balance somewhere between totally sinking to the bottom and floating at the top? Can your kiddo peel enough for the orange to sink…and then remove some of the orange slices so it floats back up again?

B) Naked Egg & Osmosis: 

This one is a short and simple experiment with a lot of downtime. First, have your kiddo touch an egg and figure out if it’s hard or soft. Next, leave that egg in a container full of vinegar and watch that calcium carbonate egg shell wither away into nothingness. This is actually interesting to watch as you’ll see bubbles form as that poor shell gets dissolved away. Now, like I wrote earlier, there is a lot of downtime. After your 10 second shell toughness check, you can pretty much stick this back into the fridge for the next 24 hours while the vinegar works it’s magic—um…science.

If all works out well, you’ll have a naked egg with only a membrane surrounding it! If not, change the vinegar solution into a fresh vinegar solution, and cough awkwardly as you put the eggs back into the fridge informing your little one that you’ll need to wait a little bit longer. Back to assuming that all worked out well, this is when you do another hardness test to see that your hard egg has turned into a little softie!

So that’s it, pretty easy! Don’t forget to wash all hands involved since this is a raw egg experiment! You can take this experiment even further (with more downtime) by experimenting with osmosis. You can stick your egg into a cup of corn syrup and see what happens the next day. If you have multiple eggs, stick them in various liquids, and see what happens to each of the eggs. Since you’ve been soaking your eggs in vinegar, that’ll be your control. Can you figure out which liquids make your egg plump up and which ones deflate (tip: distilled water and corn syrup are probably the easiest way to see the biggest difference)?

C) Magic Milk: 

For this dairy experiment, you’ll need milk (the fattier, the better!), food dye, toothpicks, and dish soap. In a wide dish:

1) put a thin layer of milk down,

2) drop a few drops of food dye in different spots,

3) dip a toothpick in some dish soap,

4) put the toothpick in the center of the drops in the milk, and

5) watch those fireworks go!

If you have an older kiddo, this one is great for exercising those fine motor skills, because you need to get the soapy toothpick end in each dot fast! For younger kids who can’t quite do that, even swirling around the toothpick and hitting each dot will be artistic fun! What’s going on here? You’ve got milk fat and soap molecules rushing through the crowd of milk proteins and other stranger molecules to find each other like long lost friends. And there are a LOT of these molecules searching and bonding. At once. Poor food coloring—all it did was get in the way!

D) Ice and Freezing Fun:

Ah, ice. Simple, yet so often overlooked. With melting experiments, you can actually buy yourself time to make dinner. In. Peace. Perfect over the summer, your kiddos can cool down while playing with melting ice. Freeze a block of ice. Supply salt. Supply warm water. Supply cold water. And of course, supply whatever fun supplies you can find in your drawers: medicine droppers, spoons, brushes, straws. Let your kiddos see how their block of ice changes over time as they experiment with what they’re given! For older kiddos who want a challenge, freeze some items like beads (pro tip: freeze in layers so all your beads aren’t at the bottom or top) and have your kiddo rescue the beads with the given supplies! Does the salt help melt the ice? Why isn’t the warm water warm anymore? There are so many fun ways to explore!

And then if your kiddo is over melting and wants to explore freezing, try a freezing experiment where you try to figure out what liquids freeze first! Your kiddo will get to see how different items freeze at different rates, and you’ll realize you have a lot more liquids in your fridge and pantry than you first thought! If you use a small enough ice tray, you’ll start noticing differences as soon as 15 mins!

E) Wizards Brew: 

Great for a Halloween themed experiment, you can make Wizard’s Brew or Witch’s Potion (although this is so much fun any time of the year!). Think erupting volcanos. For this one, you’ll need vinegar, baking soda, and dish soap at a minimum. All you need to do is:

1) fill up a container with vinegar,

2) add dish soap,

3) add baking soda, and

4) have fun watching your kiddos laugh!

What’s going on here is that you have the vinegar and baking soda chemically reacting to create Hydrogen Peroxide. When that occurs, Carbon Dioxide gas is formed and gets trapped in the dish soap, making bubbles! Lots. Of. Bubbles! You can add glitter or food coloring for some added fun. You can change the containers and make different effects (you can even use a Jack-O-Lantern during Halloween!).

To get different reactions, you can try changing what liquid soap you use, how much baking soda you add (dump a lot or little sprinkles), stirring the mix (do bubbles form faster?), or drop in different colors of food coloring without mixing and see what colors you get! Even if your kiddo isn’t old enough to understand the chemical reactions going on, they’ll LOVE all the insta-bubbles!

For older kiddos or if you’re ready for more of a challenge, you can add yeast to the mix for a slower reaction that now has an exothermic effect (you’ll feel your container get warmer!). You can learn more about that HERE 

There you have it: five easy kitchen science experiments to get you started! If you have a favorite kitchen science experiment you’d like to share, shout out in the comments below! Feel free to email me at blog@bothellfamilycoop.org as well!

Tadpoles, Frogs, and Snails (Oh my!)

This month's animals are tadpoles, frogs and snails! Our preschool is lucky to have tadpoles (soon-to-be frogs!) visiting our classroom for several weeks right now allowing us to watch how the these amazing creatures transform!

To teach your little ones more about what they can expect from our animal guests during this time, here's a fabulous video hosted by two kids!