Related posts:

1. Wordless Wednesday
2. Wordless Wednesday – Erosion
3. Wordless Wednesday – No Meteors, …

• Mapping – draw a picture of the area you’re cleaning and when you pick something up mark it.  For older kids you could mark what it is too.  Then discuss if there are any ‘hot spots’ and why they might have lots of rubbish there.  Remember rubbish can be there directly or indirectly – maybe behind the bush is a place lots of kids sit and drop their cans, or maybe the wind blows all the chip packets into the yard.
• Sampling – use a hoop or tie a rope into a loop and put it down at random, then count everything inside it.  This generally works best if there are lots of whatever you are counting – one can would be pretty boring, but 15 lolly wrappers could be interesting.  Compare different areas.  See if you can use your samples to guess how much rubbish there is in the whole area.
• Measuring – how much do you have?  There are lots of ways to measure it, you can count bags and have a discussion about whether they are the same size, hang bags on either end of a coathanger for a simple balance scale, or even use bathroom scales to weigh the bags.  Older kids can even draw simple picture graphs, maybe there are 3 bags from the path, 4 bags from the park and 1 bag from your yard.
• Sort it – How many groups can you make?  Will you put all the food rubbish together, or all the plastic rubbish?  You could even sort by size or by age.  Recyclable vs non-reclyclable.  There are lots of ways to sort what you find and they all tell different stories.  There is the story of what is done in that area to cause the rubbish.  The story of how it’s made, the story of what can happen to it next.

So grab some plastic bags and get out there!

Method:

1. Get a variety of foods, we used bread, mandarin, cauliflower, cheese and yoghurt just because that’s what we had available.
2. Put them in a container you can seal and throw away, I thought it was a good time to break out the collection of empty jars.
3. Sprinkle in some water and leave them open for a while (half an hour or so) to let them collect some spores.  There are spores everywhere, it doesn’t mean your house is unhygienic!
4. Seal them and leave them in a nice warm place to grow, check them every few days.

Predict:

What do you think is going to happen?

They’re going to be green.

Do you think they’ll all be the same?

Yes.

Why?

I think they’ll grow some mould. (Unfortunately I’d already told her the day before we could grow some mould, so she was remembering here.)

Observe:

She drew diagrams of each container and we talked about them.  She made all decisions on colours etc by herself.  Drawing what you see is extremely hard.  We all tend to draw what we know is there – think about little kids’ drawings of dogs that have 4 legs sticking out to the sides.  It doesn’t look like a dog, but they know it should have 4 legs so they put them in.  Or stereotypical drawings of the sun with rays coming out, or blue water.  So for any age, drawing what you see in front of you is a really good exercise to get the brain working.

She chose the greeny colour to be white, I have no idea why!

I drew the mandarin slices at her request, then she put the “sticky out seeds” in.

Not much happened to the cauliflower, I was surprised.

“This is to show that it’s all wibbly and moves around.”  She decided how to show that the yoghurt was very liquid.

“The black is where it’s all fluffy up the top.”  The green is where the little one decided to help too!

[Non-science based proud Mummy moment:  After she'd done the drawings she decided to write her explanations too.  While she was talking about the cheese she said "Be-cause ..." and wrote a B (bottom middle).  Completely unprompted.]

Explain:

What do you think the white stuff is?

Maybe it has turned into a soft white ball.  But some of it’s yucky and black.

Why do you think the seeds came out of the mandarin?

The seeds came out because we put water in.

What happened to the cheese?

Because of the mould.  It’s water but it’s yellow.

Did the cheese make it yellow?

The cheese melted, that’s why it’s yellow.  And the white fluffy stuff is like foam.  It’s the mould.

Conclusion:

The POE framework worked really well, she enjoyed doing all the different parts and seeing it through.  She was very excited to see what had happened to them and thought drawing them was great fun. I was impressed at how well she represented what she could see and the abstract thinking for the yoghurt.

Coming up with her own explanations didn’t worry her – most of them didn’t really explain, but having a go was the most important bit here.  Getting kids to think of their own ideas rather than asking for answers from you is more important than learning about mould!  And all her ideas were relevant and appropriate – we did put water in the mandarin, the cheese did melt.  So she’s making connections between her predictions, what we did, general knowledge and what happened.  Technically that’s synthesis, and it’s a high level of thinking.

What’s an activity where your kids have explained it to you?  Have you done a long-term structured activity?  Did the structure make it successful?

Related posts:

1. Website Review: Growing Kids

1. Splash in puddles – how high can you make it splash?  How far?



2. Streams – do you have any natural streams that flow around your house or garden?  Where does it drain to?
3. Dig trenches to see if you can make streams and ponds and get them to flow properly!  This is tricky.
4. Leaf racing – drop leaves into a flow and see who wins.  What sort of leaf goes the fastest?
5. Race raindrops down a window – each choose one and watch them meander down.  What happens when they touch each other?
6. Watch clouds – What colours are they?  What types?  How far do they go?  Then check out this gallery of 9 extraordinary clouds. 



7. Find a rainbow or a moonbow – this is a lunar rainbow, it needs a bright, almost full moon that is low in the sky, a dark night, and it needs to be raining opposite the moon.  They usually appear grey, because they are too faint to activate the colour receptors in our eyes.  There are some really good photos on the web.
8. Sing or modify nursery rhymes.  There’s the obvious, but what about

Rain, rain, rainy sky
Wash our cares away!
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
We go out to play. (And no comments on my musical abilities please.)

9. Erosion – Set up a mixed pile of dirt and rocks at the top of a slope, you can use a plank, gutter, or even a sloping path.  Then after the rain see how it has been sorted and how far it’s been carried.
10. Catch it in different containers – see how deep it gets and if the size and shape of the container makes a difference. 



11. Watch the drops splashing – What happens when they hit the ground?  Do they look different when they splash in a puddle or on the ground?  What about on dirt?
12. Find the limits of the shower – We seem to get a lot of spot showers, you can walk or ride around afterwards and find a line where one side is wet and the other dry.  This only works with little showers!
13. Smell things.  The whole world smells different after the rain.  Can you describe it?  What is it like?  Can you catch it in a jar?

What do you do when it’s raining?

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2. Where Do I Live?
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1. Wordless Wednesday – Bubble Bath

Tectonic Plates

The earth’s crust is made up of several tectonic plates, floating on softer, moveable rocks.  They move because of convection currents.  When anything is heated it becomes less dense and lighter, because there is less matter in the same area, and the denser, heavier matter pushes it up out of the way.  When it gets to the top, in this case the surface of the earth, it can’t go any higher so it spreads out.  Eventually it gets cold and dense again so it sinks back down.

The plates floating on the surface are carried along with the material underneath.

This map shows the major plate boundaries, there are several things to notice -

• Lots of plate boundaries are along the edges of continents.
• There are plate boundaries near the world’s major mountain chains – Himalayas, Andes, Rockies.
• Several plate boundaries go through island chains.
• The major boundary running between the Americas and Africa and Europe is roughly parallel to the coastlines.  (Others are too, that one’s just really obvious on this map.)

These are all consequences of the three things plate boundaries can do.

Diverging Boundaries (Spreading ridges) -

Most of these are the ones in the middle of the ocean, although the Great Rift Valley in Africa is also spreading.  These are the places where the hot rock is coming up from the middle of the earth, it’s like an ongoing volcanic eruption.  The lava comes up and pushes the ridges apart, that one running North / South is what has formed the Atlantic ocean and is spreading the Red Sea.  It’s also the cause of the volcanos on Iceland, in fact all the islands in the mid-Atlantic are just very high parts of the mid-Atlantic ridge that are currently above sea level.

Converging Boundaries -

This is where two plates are moving towards each other, one has to go underneath the other.  This is what is happening along the west coast of the Americas.  When there is a continent near the edge, the sea floor always goes underneath because it is denser and the continent floats on the top.  This is called subduction.  Put your hands with one on top of the other facing together and they don’t slip past each other smoothly – they bend, get caught, and suddenly let go.  This is exactly what happens to the plates – the bending causes the large mountain ranges to form along continental boundaries, and the catching and letting go is an earthquake.  There are often volcanos associated with it as well, because the plate going under starts to melt and the magma bubbles up.

There is a major converging boundary that isn’t on the edge of a continent – the north of India.  This used to be a normal converging boundary covered by a shallow sea, until the subcontinent of India ran up against Asia.  Neither of them can go under because they are too light and thick so both plates are buckling, throwing up the Himalayas and all the mountain chains through central Asia.  This has had a major effect on plate movements around the world, changing the direction of movement of all the other plates.

Transform Boundaries -

This is where two plates are sliding sideways past each other, it’s similar to a converging boundary because it gets caught then releases suddenly, causing an earthquake.

Earthquakes

When you try to slide your hands, you usually notice a few small slips, then a big slip, then more small slips as they settle into a new position.  The same happens with earthquakes.  I’ve recently heard of ‘pre-shocks’ that come before a big earthquake, and then there can be aftershocks that continue for decades.  Geological time is very different to our time.  And of course your hands are only dealing with pressure in one direction, but in the earth there are multiple convection currents and multiple plates, all moving against each other.

Haiti is on the northern border of the Caribbean plate, a transform boundary.  But the south of the Caribbean plate is subducting under the South American plate, as are the Cocos and Nazca plates.  This is what has caused the 2010 Chilean earthquake, in 1960 the same area experienced the strongest earthquake ever recorded.

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It covers:

• Why should I do science with my kids?  How can you do it with a baby!?
• Observation – what is it and how can babies, toddlers and kids do it?
• How to turn anything your kids are doing into a science activity.
• Lots of suggestions for activities you can do.
• Predict, Observe, Explain, a simple framework science teachers use.  (I’ve just done one of these with my 4 year old which will be posted next week.  Very proud Mummy moment!)
• Suggested resources.
• Heaps of links back to the blog to explain the activities in more detail.

Much of it is covered somewhere or other on the blog, although a lot of it has just been written up for the first time.  But because it is in a standard book format you can find things more easily than trying to search for a blog post when you don’t know what you’re searching for!  I think this way is more useable on a day-to-day basis.  As an ebook, it has links throughout so you can zoom around inside it rather than turning pages, plus embedded links to useful activities on the blog.  Or if you want to take it to bed or read it while getting the baby to sleep, print it out.  And if things get spilt on it, you can print it again!

So download, then come back and join in the party

Cheers!

I have red or white wine,

beer,

and softdrinks

There are some nibblies now,

the pizza will be out of the oven soon (depending on your timezone),

And there might even be some dessert later.

So enjoy yourselves and say hello!

Related posts:

1. 10 Things that can be turned into a science experiment – for babies to big kids.
2. Where Do I Live?
3. Trying to Watch for Meteors – an excursion and the aftermath

We’ve been eating by candlelight the last couple of days, just because the girls asked to and why not? It’s fun to do something different.  Actually they asked to eat in the dark, the candles are a compromise.  They mostly come in glass holders with dire threats of what will happen if they touch the glass but they had a great time blowing them out the first night.  The last one my husband put a plate over it to close it and we watched as the flame slowly died.

Of course they wanted to know why, so we said that candles need to breathe like we do and the plate stopped the air getting in so they couldn’t breathe.

The next night they wanted to use a plate on all of them.  One candle was fairly new and very full, another very old with only a little bit at the bottom.  We’ll pause for a second while you predict what happened.

….

…

…

So what do you think?

That’s right, the old one had lots of space and air, so it took a long time to go out.  The new one only had a bit of air up the top, so it went out straight away.

Now the clever girl bit – getting in before the chorus of whys, we asked the big girl why she thought it happened   And her answer was right – because the wax is high in that one and it only has a little gap, but the old one has a big gap.  Before I start celebrating, she didn’t have any other rationale and got the next prediction wrong.  She thought the candle in the big holder would go out quickly, but of course it took ages.  While I’m writing this I just asked her why the candles go out with the plates on them and she said it was because they couldn’t breathe.

So what do we have?  She obviously remembers the explanation I gave her.  She may be applying it, or it may have been a good guess!  But the interesting thing is that she came up with her own explanation (the amount of wax and air) that was completely independent – if she was extrapolating from the rule she’d been given about breathing, that’s amazing, but the fact that she noticed the different sizes and thought it was important is also pretty amazing.

And the moral of the story: Don’t explain everything to your kids! See what they can explain to you too.

Important safety note: Don’t use a plastic plate.  And don’t pick up the plate after it’s been on a big candle for a while.  Ask my husband.

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Cover 1 -

Cover 2 -

Cover 3 -

Thanks to everyone for visiting and voting, and to all of you who confirmed that my children are adorable!

Unfortunately after some feedback I’ve done a bit of research and discovered that there have actually been cases of children being put in microwaves.  I am horrified, I honestly didn’t think it was possible, and I cannot use it now.  So when the book goes live on Friday it will have a different name and a different adorable photo.

Firstly, the immune system in general.  Our bodies face multiple attacks every day.  They are not only attacked by people who are obviously sick – there are environmental antigens and even the colonies living inside us can cause problems.  Thrush is a perfect example – it is normal in the gut, but in the mouth, nipples and vagina it will make us sick if our immune system doesn’t deal with it straight away.  This contamination happens all the time, but most of us are lucky enough not to have thrush continuously because our immune system just deals with it.  In other words every single one of us who is not immune compromised has a good immune system. Your immune system deals with thousands of threats a year, the times you get sick are the tiny percentage compared to the times it is defeated.  If you want numbers, say conservatively your immune system faces 1000 threats in a year and you have 8 colds – that’s a 0.8% failure rate!  If you’re a little kid and get lots of colds, you might have a 0.15% failure rate.  Even an extremely sickly child who had a new cold every single week (it actually takes little ones longer than that to get over things, but hypothetically an extreme case) would be looking at a 5% failure rate.  To me, that sounds like it’s working extremely well – I wish I had a 95% success rate!

In fact, if you get a cold your immune system has not failed, so I really shouldn’t say “failure rate,” it is a temporary setback.  It only fails if you die or are only saved by medicine.  Having a cold is just the delay between an antigen building up enough for you to notice it and your immune system getting rid of it.  We all notice different levels of discomfort at different times, depending on far more than our viral load.

People can be immune compromised for a number of reasons, including chemotherapy and pregnancy.  Most of us are familiar with AIDS – acquired immune deficiency syndrome – the reason it was isolated was because doctors noticed people with really weird diseases that usually occur in parrots or cancer patients.  People were dying of things that the rest of us don’t even notice are around – we are still attacked by them, but our immune system deals with them so quickly we don’t know about it.  For the average person without those specific conditions the immune system is extremely strong.  It can be affected by deficiencies in particular nutrients, but getting extra is not going to boost it to super extra extremely strong.

The world from a virus’ point of view is rather different to ours.  A virus exists to make more of itself.  It generally does this by hijacking other species’ cells and hiding there.  Once it infects a host it has to make as much of itself as it can and move on to other hosts, because there are generally only two outcomes – the host destroys the virus, or dies itself (in which case there are no more nice cells and the virus dies too).  So viruses have all sorts of clever ways to get themselves spread as quickly as they can.  In a herd, this is much easier than with separated individuals – there are lots of potential hosts all around you.

The way herd immunity works is by isolating potential hosts and reducing virus’ opportunities to be passed on.  Have a look at the first picture.  It represents 100 people with a 95% vaccination rate.  There are also around 10% of the population who have reduced immunity to that particular virus for some reason.  This is just a representative figure – our immune systems have different reactions to different viruses and vaccines so there is never 100% coverage, some diseases are very high and some fairly low.  We all know people who’ve had chicken pox more than once, or who have lost their immunity to rubella.  It doesn’t mean they have a bad immune system, it means they haven’t developed full immunity to that particular antigen.  They are the people who are light pink.

The dark pink people are those who haven’t been vaccinated, for whatever reason, or had the disease.  You can see that these people are relatively isolated.  If one of them were to have the virus, there is a ‘fence’ of vaccinated people around them which stops the virus – there is nowhere for it to multiply because the new host stops it straight away.

Now consider a population with 80% vaccination.  It sounds pretty good, but look at the graphic -

There is no ‘fence’ around these people, if one of them were to get the virus it could easily be passed to another without immunity, then another, and another.  So the disease in this population will never be controlled because there is always someone else it can go to.

In reality it is even worse, because people who are unvaccinated tend to be in clusters.

You can see here there are pockets that are almost completely unprotected, or have very low vaccination rates.  This is bad for two reasons – first, it is disastrous for those inside the pocket.  If the virus gets loose in there it will spread quickly and there will be an epidemic.  And the reality is that very few people who are unvaccinated are that way through their own choice – the decision has been made for them by circumstance or by their parents.  Secondly, it has been shown that it is safer to be unvaccinated and surrounded by an immune population, that fully vaccinated and surrounded by non-immune people.  So the groups are bigger than they appear when you add in the people on the periphery who are in danger of repeated attacks by the virus – the more attacks there are, the more likely one is to get through!

That’s a lot of people who are in danger when the epidemic hits.

One last graphic to show why it’s so important to have very high coverage, this is a population with only 70% immunity.  This is not unusual in pockets, or in countries without easy access to vaccines.

In fact it’s fantastic for some countries, but still not good enough.  You can see there is no separation of non-immune people, a virus would happily circulate in this population forever and people are depending on their personal immunity.

In summary:

• Unless someone is immunocompromised, their immune system is fine.  In fact it’s awesomely fantastic.
• Getting sick is not the immune system failing, it is just taking longer to deal with the threat.  It only fails if you die or need medical support to survive.
• We all respond differently to different viruses at different times.
• A virus’ purpose is to be spread to as many people as it possibly can, as quickly as it can.
• Herd immunity builds a fence around non-immune people, so viruses cannot find new hosts and are stuck in a dead end (literally).
• Herd immunity has to be extremely high to work – if the non-immune people meet up, the virus can use them like a road to get around the whole population and will continue.
• When non-immune people are in clusters they are just waiting for the epidemic and the people around the edges of the cluster are also in danger.

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