Fun Science Activities at Home

During the pandemic, my daughter was just starting kindergarten, and I suddenly had to balance her education with a one-year-old, and not being able to return to work in the classroom. Fortunately, I had taught kindergarten for a few years and knew what was required, expected, and what could be cut.

The first thing I have always believed about kindergarten is that children learn best through hands-on play. This is a major reason why they have "Centres" in many kindergarten classrooms, including the water table, sand table, blocks, house, and other fun areas. Children learn to cooperate through playing together, and also learn many other facts about the world through exploring their environments.

At home, we don't need to set up fancy things for our kids to learn and explore. Baking with our children teaches them scientific principles of heat, acids and bases, proper measurement, and also rewards them for their efforts by giving them delicious treats in the end. A mud kitchen in the backyard lets them imagine and play and learn the properties of water, and various textures.

Of course, this doesn't mean you can't teach them specific things with specific experiments. We had coleslaw on the weekend, and I boiled the purple cabbage core to extract the colour, which makes a perfect acid/base indicator.

In addition to acids/bases, you can talk about colour theory, and children work on their grip strength and fine motor skills by using the eye droppers.

I put some baking soda in one jar, plain water, lemon juice, and white vinegar into the others. I left one jar empty. The kids put the plain indicator in the empty jar as a control, then put indicator into each of the jars to see which ones were acidic and basic.

There is so much learning happening here! When I taught grade 5 I used a variety of chemicals and made nearly a whole rainbow of colours. These young children got to use kitchen-safe chemicals, and then were able to mix them and see the bubbles from the baking soda and vinegar reaction after the colours are mixed. As they mixed the baking soda and vinegar with the colours in them, they saw how the colour changed. They wanted to make brown, but no matter how they tried, it didn't work, so we talked about colour theory. It was a great activity that can be tailored to a variety of ages because each age has something to learn from it.

Let me know in the comments below if you've tried this and how your kids enjoyed this experiment!