Big Kid has been in her element lately, and happy as a marine bivalve. Ever since I started giving her more access to "academics" (is that an applicable term when you're sounding out "s-h-i-p" and doing subtraction problems with beans?), she's been in better than usual spirits and has been difficult to rouse from her favorite tabletop working-type activities. It's both good and bad that she's self-selecting what is basically schoolwork as her daily bread; I anticipate her genuinely enjoying public school when she begins in just over a year, which is a personality quirk I cannot relate to but expect will serve her well; however, I also want her outside riding her bike and jumping in puddles and playing with other kids. She does all of that with gusto, but even with the amazing weather we've had this weekend she's been insisting on doing her current two favorite, and decidedly indoor, activities for long stretches before she'll consent to running jumping climbing trees type experiences.
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't super stoked on her favorite new pasttime.
The other day I took her to the toy store hoping to find a science kit that she would like. In the past she has been enormously excited about science. At three she asked for a plastic human body model for Christmas (which my grandmother gave her, and which was played with so much it broke), as well as a microscope (which my aunt gave her, and has been in use off and on; I think I would recommend a simple dissecting scope for someone that young, because she doesn't have the manual dexterity to use the focus knobs...she thinks it's cool, but she prefers activities that she can do independently). And a couple years ago she used her birthday money to buy a model of a human heart. Her interest in science is quite thrilling for her father and I, since we're both kind of science nerds ourselves (he's the one with the actual background in it; I was a history major and haven't done a lab since high school physics).
There were some interesting kits at the toy store, and ones that are obviously geared towards little guys, with themes like "pizza" and "bubblegum" as well as more basic science-y kits, like the extremely cool Thames & Kosmos Little Labs series (the Magic Schoolbus kits also seem interesting and age appropriate). What caught her eye, though, was the Learning Resources Primary Science Set.
I was skeptical about buying it, because it seemed overpriced for what I thought it was (some cheap plastic lab equipment replicas), so I tried to convince her to go home with a game, or a puzzle, or a toy, even, but she insisted that she wanted the science set. So, fine, we bought the set.
I should not have hesitated; this thing is awesome.
Basically, it is a set of plastic replicas of laboratory equipment. They are not, however, of poor quality. They're sturdy, attractive, and fully functional as experimental equipment. The set comes with ten experiment cards, all of which are extremely general and basic and could be done at home without any of the equipment in the set. You can use the normal cups and pitchers you have around the house to make celery draw tinted water up its veins, or make raisins bob up and down in soda water. My daughter is kind of at the point where she wants to talk about the hydrogen-oxygen bond in water, so the experiments were fun for her but maybe not quite as "science-y" as she had imagined they would be.
BUT!
The real value of this set (for us, anyway) isn't in the experiments themselves, although our kid did all of them within hours of buying the kit (she was insistent that I had to run out for ingredients immediately). She liked them well enough, but she loves this set because of the nifty tools, which are a geeky child's equivalent of a toy workbench or play kitchen.
Good gracious...sorry for the blurry photo. I often can't tell until I upload them.
Anyway, the kit comes with a beaker, a funnel, tweezers, a pipette, a magnifying glass, goggles, test tubes with racks, and a freaking Erlenmeyer flask. They are all cartoonishly oversized and made of sturdy, thick plastic, just right for a preschoolers' mitts of doom.
But they look like real lab equipment! Fun, fun!
We started out with the good ol' baking soda and vinegar combo, which didn't really explode up out of the beaker until we busted out the straight baking soda with a spoon. Then, it was quite satisfactory.
I have to point out here that she was doing all of this while wearing her ballet suit and a Fancy Nancy tutu, a combination which is utterly and completely her. I have a cousin who recently graduated from Stanford with a major in pre-med and a minor in dance, which I can totally see my kid doing. Fulfill the needs of the head and the heart if you possibly can.
I also have to point out that my husband is wearing black socks with shorts in that photo. I can't tell you exactly what's wrong with him. Obviously something.
The experiment that really caught her attention was the color mixing, which simply directs the child to mix primary-colored food coloring (red, yellow and blue) into water and then mixing those to create tertiary colors (the child is supposed to hypothesize as to what will happen when each color mixes). I think the colors are appealing, but she also gets to use almost all of her new "stuff" while she does it.
We taught her all of the correct terminology for her equipment, and her dad showed her that the proper way to mix the contents of test tubes in a laboratory is to hold them at the top and gently spin the bottoms. She has spent the last few days painstakingly mixing carefully counted drops of food coloring into measures of water poured from her beaker into her test tubes and then using her pipette to add the color from the large test tube to the colors in the small ones. Her aim, every time, is to fill her Erlenmeyer flask to the top with green water, which she makes by adding blue water to yellow water. That's it. She could fill up the Erlenmeyer with clear water and then throw in some food coloring, but she does it test tube by test tube, measuring out all of her elements with the highest degree of precision she can attain at this age, and pouring the green result into her flask with the aid of her funnel.
I find the whole process incredibly charming.
She calls this "doing science", although it's really just playing with water (however meticulously). She wants to do it every day before breakfast. This morning I needed her to get dressed quickly so we could go out, and ended up raising my voice a bit to tell her "You can't do any science until you get your clothes on!"
Ho ho! Nerds.
I love that she's playing at this so diligently. It's completely age-appropriate, but it's also letting her try on a role that she may actually end up wanting to pursue as an adult. I mean, there's nothing sexy about lab work, but if you're the kind of person who loves that method of investigation it can be incredibly interesting...to hang out and play with test tubes, to work with precision and have the patience to adhere to a strict process. That's exactly what she's doing.
I love hearing my kid say "Erlenmeyer". I love seeing her tightly cap her test tubes, gently swirl them and place them carefully in their racks. I love that she knows what a "pipette" is. I love watching her be in love with science.
Going to bed the night after we bought the kit, she began to ask me about color and light. She wanted to know why we see colors as we do. Since she knows that vision involves light bouncing off of objects and entering the eye, I began to explain that white light is actually made of the rainbow of visible light, all held together, and that the pigments in different objects reflect different parts of that rainbow and absorb others.
We talked about prisms and she said she would like one very much.
So I guess I'll need to find her one of those.
And a lab coat.
(And for the "pie" part of the Science and Pie dyad, I am turning 30 in about an hour. I spent today eating my way through most of a fruit tart, because I don't think that's in the offing for my birthday dessert tomorrow and I'm not sucking up the 3-0 without pastry cream and blueberries. I'm also thinking about how to satisfy my daughter's request for a "choccy biccy" birthday cake. You could probably make a cracker crust from them, but what to fill it with? Suggestions for that and killer fruit tarts welcome.)
