From the category archives:

Observation

Pendulum Waves

February 6, 2012 Energy and Change

First watch this video: How cool is that? And did you like the setup in the beginning when they showed you there were no tricks, it’s just a line of pendulums of different lengths. This, my friends, is all about maths. And physics, but at this level physics is pretty much applied maths. Pendulums Pendulums [...]

Wordless Wednesday – Rubbings

December 14, 2011 Materials

Do you have any idea how many patterned, textured surfaces you have around your home? Hundreds. Trust me. Obligatory Christmas tie-in – use rubbings to make wrapping paper, just use crayons or pencils on butcher’s paper. Kidlet’s creatively entertained and personalised paper as elaborate as you want.

Colour Answers

December 2, 2011 Energy and Change

1. We see because our eyes pick up light that has bounced off the things around us. It feels a little backwards, but the colour something appears is the colour it reflects rather than absorbs. A green book would absorb every colour except green and bounce the green back to us. Colour is determined by [...]

Wordless Wednesday – A Day

November 30, 2011 Earth and Beyond

This is something I’ve been trying to do for ages, either life gets in the way or the day is deadly boring. Most photos are half an hour apart, the evening gets closer and the last sunset shots are only a couple of minutes. For a camera set up on a tripod there’s a worrying [...]

Sparkles

November 24, 2011 Activities

Little girl loves gluing at the moment. She doesn’t care if it’s a stick or brush, the sheer pleasure of spreading glue around is enough. It’s even more important than actually sticking anything to the glue, which is driving the control freak in me mad. In a bid to make it a bit different I’ve [...]

Quiz – The Baby Edition

November 15, 2011 Life and Living

I should probably call it the reproductive edition, although I’m only looking at animals. But have you ever thought about all the different solutions to passing your genes on? What is the difference between precocial and altricial babies? A nice easy one for Australians – how do monotremes have babies? How is gender determined in [...]

Smelling Pots

August 18, 2011 Activities

We smell things quite a bit, lots of flowers, crushed leaves and cooking spices. Two of our most common activities are walking and cooking, so almost every day we’ll stop and smell something. Yet smell generally is almost invisible. We notice it when something particularly enticing or horrible wafts past. We notice when a smell [...]

The Magic Trick

August 11, 2011 Activities

We were cleaning up various bits of paint, coloured water and containers outside when we decided to do a magic trick and move water from one container to another without pouring or touching it! You can see the setup, two containers, the higher one with water and a twisted up serviette joining them. It took [...]

A Different Point of View

August 4, 2011 Activities

The little girl loves her mirror, it was one of the more successful presents I’ve bought her (most get lost or ignored). So we’ve been playing some more games with it. She was fascinated to discover her eyes are brown “with a black spot in the middle!” Interestingly, she also told me that everyone has [...]

Wordless Wednesday – Volcano

July 20, 2011 Earth and Beyond

Yes more holiday photos. From where we were staying we could see this volcano in the distance and spent many hours walking up and down the beach and watching the clouds. Then we drove up the mountain to visit it ourselves. The girls were fascinated by the old lava flow and how close the village was. [...]