Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Bouncy Balls!


So our project today was making bouncy balls. The kids love bouncy balls. They are all over the house! I figured this would be perfect.
 It was fun, but it's a little more complicated than just putting vinegar in baking soda like we did a few weeks ago. It was a little hard because the kids couldn't measure things as easily. It's fun to see them work with what they can though. They love to make things and add food coloring to it! 
Happy kids! This is before they melted into blobs!
The problem came after they were finished. I'm not sure if our chemistry was off and I didn't mix things right, or what. They didn't solidify and just flattened out. We are going to try again. Ben has reminded me a hundred times already. Hopefully we can get a final product that doesn't look quite like this!
After an hour or so... no longer a ball shape!










Homemade Bouncy Balls

2 cups
Measuring spoons
A stir stick
2 tbsp hot water
1/2 tsp borax
1 tbsp glue
1 tbsp corn starch
Food coloring (optional)

Pour the water and borax into the first cup and stir the mixture until it is dissolved.

Pour the glue, cornstarch and food coloring into the second cup and mix. Then add the mixture from the first cup into the second cup.

Let the ingredients sit for 15 seconds then stir.

Once the mixture becomes difficult to stir, scoop it out of the cup, and roll into a ball. Enjoy!!!

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

a Pinteresting summer

Yeah, I'm good at blogging for a while and not keeping up with it. I'm going to give it another shot!

I've never claimed to be a good stay at home mom. I'm not entertaining and I have OCD, so I follow my kids around with a broom and mop! I'm working to change that this summer. Pinterest is helping me. I've decided to do one Pinterest craft each week with my kids and write about it. Hopefully writing about it will help me remember to do it.

I'm embracing mess and letting it go until my kids are done. The fact that I'm letting them make it is a huge step for me. They are having a ball though and it's fun to watch them. I realized today how much I harp on them by the amount of times they apologized when something spilled. I have to let go!

Our project today we will call volcano art. All you need is baking soda, vinegar, food coloring, and eye droppers. I found baking soda for 2/$1 at Marcs so I gave each kid an entire box. They dumped it in a pyrex pan. Then I put vinegar in separate cups and added food coloring. They filled their eye droppers with dyed vinegar and dropped it into the baking soda. They seriously played for half an hour just dropping vinegar! It was awesome.

I don't get into science behind things or why things happen. I just let them have fun and make designs. The best part of this is that I've started looking forward to our Pinterest projects. The kids don't know where I get ideas or that I scour Pinterest for them. They just like the fun. I've started looking forward to the time and spend a lot of time and effort finding the right project just for us!



Hadley's final project. She just put color wherever.
Ben's final design. He was careful to put color all the way around the edge.

Ben finished by dumping cups of vinegar on top.