Tuesday, September 25, 2018

P15 - Water Cycle

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The activity, I am sharing today actually started two years back in her nursery school. Her class teacher taught her about water cycle. I am not sure when it was introduced to us when we were kids, but surely not in primary school 😂😂. 

It was not just learning the water cycle, she was supposed to talk about it. It was very difficult for me to make her remember few lines which can explain the water cycle. So, I wrote a poem which she can remember easily. 

When Sun shine heats the water,
Water becomes vapor and goes up in the sky.
Vapor cools down and becomes the cloud,
Clouds gets heavy and fall back as rain.
This is called water cycle.

First time I wrote an english poem. I was very excited and she was very happy to present it in her class.


Now, when she is in Senior KG, again her teacher explained the water cycle. As she is big now, she understood little and asked few questions to me. So, I decided to do the water cycle experiment.

What you Need:
        - One container to make sea
        - Another small container which works as rain water collector 
        - Hot Water
        - Ice
        - Fruit wrap
        - Some stones and plant cuttings (optional) to give a feeling of earth

We added hot water to the big container and placed a small container in it. We decorated the small container with few plant cuttings and stones. Then we quickly wrapped the big container with fruit wrap. This fruit wrap will not allow the vapour to go out. Ideally, you should use the normal water and keep this container in Sun. But, it was very difficult to boil the water using sun light in a rainy season.  So, we took hot water.



The hot water got vaporised and started to move up (Evaporation). We also placed few ice cubes above the fruit wrap to give a cool environment for condensation. The water vapour convert into the tiny water droplets because of the cool environment, this is known as condensation. 


As more and more water droplets are formed, they started to combine. The big water droplets fall down because of temperature change as time passed, this is known as precipitation.  Inu was not interested in precipitation, she happily sad, 'mumma, this is rain'. We kept the ice cubes above the collector container so that all the rain gets collected in the collection container. After some time we removed the fruit wrap and saw the water collected in small container. 


The next day, it was a rainy day and I said what a lovely rainy day it is. And Inu quickly replied, 'mumma, sea water is coming in our city through rain.'


Monday, September 17, 2018

P14 - Water can walk?

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Inu was very excited in our last experiment (P13 - How plants drink water?) due to some magic feeling and beautiful colours. So, she asked, 'mumma can we do more colourful experiments?' I replied, 'Yes sure', as I wanted to show one more Capillary Action Experiment. 


I asked her, 'have you ever seen water flowing from up to down?' She said, 'mumma that always happen. Have you not seen the waterfalls.' Then I asked her, 'have you ever noticed water walking from down to up?' As I was expecting she replied, 'its impossible.'  I happily told her today I will show you water can walk up. 


I asked her fill two glasses with water and roll paper towel as shown in picture.


What we need:
        - Three glasses
        - Water
        - Paper towel
        - Food Colouring

Then we mixed different food colourings in two glasses and put the folded paper towel in the glasses such that one side of the paper towel roll is in the filled glass and the other side is in the empty glass.

After few seconds only, Inu observed water walking up through paper towel. She was very excited about it and asked is it also magic. I explained, its not magic, its actually science.  The water is moving same as it was moving up in the flower in our last experiment. The small small holes in the paper towel give space of water to go up. 

The paper towel have gaps in fiber, and water moves up in these gaps through  capillary action. She liked this one and observed the other glass getting filled with this process. 
She also observed that the water movement stops when all three glasses have same amount of water. 
She wanted to do more of this so I asked her to repeat the experiment with different type of solids. She repeated it with newspaper, glossy paper and cloth.


The water walking speed is maximum in cloth, then newspaper. In glossy paper it didn't move as the glossy paper don't have gaps. 


After the experiment is finished while washing the glasses Inu asked, 'mumma how did you know that water can walk'. We both enjoyed this experiment and learnt more about how capillary action allows water to move through solids. But I liked her question after the experiment the most. And the answer of her question took me to my childhood. 

I remember once when we were going out for vacation, my mom was worried about the plants we had. We use to have a lot of tree and pot plants in our backyard garden. So, mumma and my sister was trying different solutions. The drip irrigation was available when we were kids. For some of the pot plans they dip one end of rope in water tank and other in the pot and I observed the water walking up through the rope. Inu likes it and said nani and mausi are awesome. Of course she did repeated this in our balcony garden but I forgot to click the pictures. 

Friday, September 7, 2018

P13 - How Plants Drink Water?

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Gardening is one of our hobbies, and understanding of plants, how they grow, what they need is what we learn though our balcony garden. This particular activity is about how plants drink water.

Before starting this activity, I told her that today I am gonna show you a magic. Magic where I will colour the flower without using brush. She replied, mumma you will use sponge or something else. I told no it will be a pure magic, you just watch. 

What we need:
        - Two glasses
        - Water
        - Two white daisy flowers
        - Food Coloring

I took two glasses, filled it with water and mixed different food colours in the glasses. Now, kept the flowers in the glasses and waited for water to go up.





After few hours, we observed the colour started to appeared in the flower. It was really like a magic to my daughter. 

The change in colour happen because the colourful water reached the flower petals. 

Then I explained to her that plants take water through the roots (she knew this one already) and seep it using stem to the leaves and flowers. Leaves use the water for making food for the plant. In this process, water evaporates from the leaves to make more space for other water molecules. In this activity, we understood how water reaches the leave and flower through the stem. Water seep up through the tiny tubes in the stem. This movement of water is known as capillary action. 

Capillary action (also known as capillarity, capillary motion or wicking) is the ability of liquid to flow in narrow spaces in opposition to external forces like gravity. 

The colour on the follower petals increased as the time passed.


She enjoyed the magic and was happy to share this with you all.  

Thursday, September 6, 2018

P12 - What dissolves in water

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This activity was a practice exercise from her school, 'What dissolves in water'. In this exercise, seven things are given and kids are requested to guess whether it get dissolves in water or not. And then expected kids to test it through experiment. The seven things were:
        - Sugar
        - Salt
        - Rice
        - Water Colour
        - Paper
        - Stone
        - Coffee 

Below are pictures of her exercise. 




She was very happy that this exercise she did without my help and all her guesses were correct. 


Tuesday, September 4, 2018

P11 - Sudoku

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Sudoku is one of my favourite time pass, specially when traveling with a news paper. My father also enjoys doing it. On her summer vacation with nana and nani, she used to check the sudoku solution filled by my father. There I observed her love to Sudoku. So, I introduced this one to her.

She always enjoys mathematics, she learned counting while playing with coins. She also enjoy doing addition and subtraction. You can download more printable sheets for sudoku from https://1sudoku.com/.

I followed step by step approach to introduce it: 2x2, 3x3 and then 4x4. She still need my help to fill 6x6 and 9x9 is really far as of now.

Below are some of our efforts: