sciencey stuff for young kids: balancing butterfies

A few weeks ago, Miss J came home so excited and full of ideas... she had seen the school science fair and wanted to do " experiments". Like, RIGHT NOW. And so I got notes written to me whilst on the phone. And then I got asked at 3am one morning because it needed to be dark. And then one afternoon when I had a million things to do she looked at me and said " lets start with something easy then". The first word in my head was "No" followed by "how about later?" but my brain actually stopped and thought now hang on. Why not now? Washing,vacuuming and folding can wait. She wont. Quite obviously :)And so I told her we would do SOMETHING experimenty and went to find the science books I had. She in the mean time, found a magic book and found a cool magic trick that was also based on balance and weight and decided that this was perfect to start with.



And so, I drew her a perfectly symmetrical butterfly which she coloured and decorated with pencils. We then got two 10c pieces and glued them in the exact same position on either tips of the wings. ( actually we used Fijian money from my honeymoon... *sigh*) The photo has three coins but you only need two.. we just had to test that the bigger coins worked better.

And now for the magic!

You can now balance the butterfly on your finger!


On your nose!


On Daddys beer bottle!!


And so talked about how its based on weight and balance which she was semi interested in... but she was more into finding out what else she could balance it on :)

And she has lots more plans... just hope I can keep up :)