Plants get their energy from the sun, they collect it through their leaves.  They get their nutrients like vitamins and minerals from the ground through their roots.  They get water through their roots too.

A seed is a bit like an egg.  Inside it has a baby plant, and the rest of the seed is food to keep it going until it can get food for itself.  This is why we eat so many seeds – they’re good food for us too!

Here you can see the baby plant inside the seed.

When the baby plant is warm and moist it starts to break out of the seed.  It grows two shoots, one goes down and becomes the roots the other grows up and sprouts leaves.  These first leaves are important because they need to start getting energy for the plant to keep growing.  Then the plant grows like we do – as it gets more energy, food and water, it uses them to make new cells.  The vascular plants, which are most of the ones we know, even have special parts called phloem (fleem) and xylem (zy-lem) that carry nutrients and water around the plant a bit like our blood.  This is the sap you see when you break a plant stem.  They react to being cut or broken by producing hormones a bit like our pain chemicals.

Weeds

Weeds are just plants growing where they aren’t wanted, so they could be fine in one place but a weed somewhere else.  This is a problem in Australia because so many garden plants are introduced and then get loose in the bush, blackberry is a good example.  But most of the things we call weeds have some things in common -

• They grow quickly and easily, not needing a lot of nutrients.
• They produce lots of seeds very quickly.
• The seeds tend to be very ’sticky’ or spread a long way very easily.  Ruby dock has spread around a lot of central Australia because it dries to be soft and fluffy and blows around in the wind.
• A lot of them are prickly or poisonous.

What this means is that a young weed can start growing anywhere because they don’t need much, they get big quickly and use up all the nutrients other plants could use.  Plus when they get big they can shade other plants so they don’t get as much sunlight.  The prickles or poison protects them from animals, then they make lots of seeds that spread a long way and start all over again.

It’s very important to protect our native vegetation from introduced weeds, it’s needed by native wildlife and makes our unique ecosystems.  If you have native plants in your garden they’re much easier to care for because they are adapted to the local weather and soil, and you are likely to get far more native birds and reptiles visiting.

Related posts:

1. 10 Things To Do Outside
2. Kid Questions: How did the earth’s atmosphere form?
3. Website Review: Growing Kids

Little ones will just be thrilled to have an effect, big ones can play with it – how do I make it move further?

1. Push
2. Pull – the most direct ways of moving something.
3. Pull back and let go – for an elastic band or branch it is more indirect, it stores the energy you put in by pulling then releases it.
4. Blow – on a leaf, paper or insect, or make a simple windmill.  It’s another lovely demonstration that air is there because it can transfer a force.
5. Put it under running water – very similar to blowing, but here you can see the water.
6. Put it on a slope – whoah!  Gravity!  It doesn’t have to have wheels, we’ve sent many toys down the slide at the park.
7. Knock the supports from under it – Gravity again.  And hours of giggling.
8. Hit it with something else (eg a bat) – Exactly like blowing, but you are using the middle object to transfer the force.
9. Put it in water and push or pull the water – this one’s a bit magic.  Try floating balls in water and scooping your hand past them to move them around.  You can even have races to see who can get their ball back first without touching it.
10. Use a lever – It can be as simple as a shovel or a see-saw.  How does the balance point affect the movement?
11. Use a pulley – The simplest pulley is a rope going around a pole to change direction – move something away from you by pulling towards you.  Or go around a few poles and see how easy it becomes to lift something.
12. Use a fan – There are two levels of indirectness here – you are using a tool to move the air to move something else.  Try racing balloons around the room and see how little control you have!
13. Go all out - OK Go – This Too Shall Pass – My favourite is the Newton’s Cradle of sledghammers, watch this video, it’s seriously funny.  It might not be safe to show it to your kids though!

How have you had fun moving things around?

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Related posts:

1. 13 Things to Do When it’s Raining
2. 10 Things to Do With Balloons
3. Doing Chores – Vacuuming

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!

Related posts:

1. 10 Things to Do in the Kitchen with Babies and Kids
2. Collecting Leaves and Dichotomous Keys
3. 10 Future Scientists

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.
5. After the mould has grown, throw them out without opening them – if you open them it will spread mould spores everywhere.

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. Show me that Air is There
2. Balloons in the Bath (Learning about Liquids and Gases)
3. Sand Castles

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?

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others’ comments. It’s easy, and fun!

Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

Related posts:

1. 13 Ways to Make Things Move
2. Jumping in puddles
3. 10 Things to do with Water

Related posts:

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. Show me that Air is There
3. Website Review: CSIRO

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.

Related posts:

1. Show me that Air is There
2. Predict, Observe, Explain – Growing Mould
3. 10 Ways to Engage All the Senses for Babies Up