"Experiment"

Don't be afraid to use scientific language, like "experiment," around your child.  It's such a cool word that doesn't need to be explained verbally in kiddie terms.  It's an action word that should be shown over and over again.  Though if your child keeps asking you, a good way to explain it is "to see what happens."  Don't forget to use the word "hypothesis" or a "guess what you think will happen" before the experiments.

Here's an overview of the activity at J's school with the 4-5 year olds:
*Sink Float Experiment - kids were very enthusiastic and were able to guess which ones would sink and which ones floated.  There were some surprises.  This took a good 15-20 minutes of time.
*Submarines - the kids had a really good time, despite the rolls of pennies falling off of the submarines, the pennies covering the holes, and the straws popping out.  Most of them were able to get their submarines to sink and blow into the bottle to get it them to resurface a few times.  They got to take it home.  I'm hoping they use them as a new bath toy!

Some improvements: wrap the pennies in foil so that the rubber band doesn't slide off as easily.  Hot gluing the rubber bands down might help too.  The clay wasn't ideal, but I wasn't going to drill holes through the caps.  Maybe, I'll try that for next time.

On Saturday, I took J downstairs to collect rocks and leaves for our sink/float activity that I just completed at his school.  One of our neighbor girls was outside and joined in on the treasure hunt.  She's very inquisitive, and I told her we needed the rocks for an experiment at J's school.  Her mom told me that she won't stop talking about the "experiment."  We're now set for a playdate for the same experiment for this weekend.