milk magic!!/ incidental opposites

One of those sunsets you can hardly tear your eyes away from...one you can never quite capture with a camera, one you cant even try to paint.

Good job God :)

The word around here at the moment is "experiment".
"Mum, lets find an experiment", " Mum can we do an experiment", " Im going to experiment with water, this bubble stuff and Amahli in the bathroom".
No actually, you are not :)

Its her current buzz word and whilst she is really only just getting the meaning, she loves to use it. And so, I found all over the net, an experiment that isnt too messy but has great results.
It uses milk, food colouring and soap, and also involves rainbows so I was sold.

What you do is fill a plate ( with a slight rim) with milk.

Add drops of food colouring to that ( this part was an experiment in itself as the colours sort of bleed under the surface which was very cool to watch)


Then, carefully squirt a drop of soap into the food colouring drops and watch what happens!!



The scientific reason for this happening is this:

The drop of detergent reduces the surface tension at the point where it dissolves the fat molecules in the milk. The higher surface tension of the surrounding milk pulls the surface away from that spot, dragging the food dye with it.

But really sometimes experiments are just fun to watch :)



We are so clever we made a brain in ours!!

We had to do this a number of times, a) because she loved watching the colours explode and wanted to see if it was different if you dropped soap directly onto the colour or ir you just dropped into the plain milk, and b) cos I had a ball trying to to capture it on film :)

Something else I have been doing a fair bit of lately is talking incidentally about opposites. As a 2 yr old, Jumeirah totally got opposites and loved playing a game where I would give her a word and she would tell me the opposite. Amahli and Jared are starting to grasp the concept so I have been doing a few things to encourage this. Yesterday we played in the water trough.

Feeding time below the water, either that or there was a tsunami

One showed ABOVE the water, one showed BELOW. Boats sailed happily in the above water, and below, we had sea creatures of whales, sharks and lobsters. Amahli had the greatest time, going through about 3 sets of clothes before I stripped her until she'd finished playing.

Jared, in his 3yr old wisdom ( which funnily enough, greater than I give him credit for) sorted them out into their right trays and then began to add sand to the underwater one for the creatures to hide in.
I continued with him later that night when he asked to help me cook dinner ( its just begun and I LOVE it!) and we talked about things that we hot and things that were cold.


Moments of learning like this are easy and fun and give your kids a greater enjoyment in doing the everyday stuff. Once he had finished cooking he showed Daddy that the oven was hot and I later heard him retell it all to Jumeirah in the( experimentless) bath. She, as usual, was full of praise and started to ask him other opposites. 10 minutes later, I heard " Dont worry Jared, you dont get it yet. But keep practising". :)
LOVE :)