Science Fail!

<-- Making a paper snake

We are on week two of our science experiments. Mostly we are following an Usborne book with suggested experiments and good directions. Sonlight includes a video with some discussion of each weeks task, but sometimes it is just a related topic. Hannah also has a little composition notebook to write down her “hypothesis, test, conclusion”. We did pretty good with last week’s activities which were related to moving air. So we fanned ourselves, and used cardboard to ‘race’ paper across the floor by fanning it, and we discovered that even though a cup may look empty it actually has air in it by inverting it into a sink of water and then letting the air out.

Well, this week was supposed to be about how hot air rises. Since we live in a hot state, we don’t have a radiator and our air vents are all in our ceiling instead of in our floors. So right away I told Hannah we wouldn’t be able to do most of the experiments. We hoped that we would be able to do one with a paper snake held over ‘hot’ air and the air would make the snake ‘wriggle’. The book specifically told us not to do it over an open flame, but we thought that maybe we could do it over a candle. So we made our snake, which Hannah enjoyed. Then we tried to see if the hot air would move it and it did not. 🙁 At least we were prepared, but I’m pretty bummed that we couldn’t do any of the hot air experiments.

It is quite a coincidence that we were able to view a hot air balloon being blown up and lifted off recently in our greenbelt by our house. So we had already talked about how hot air makes the balloon go up and letting the air cool will bring the balloon back down. This was the subject of our video for the week and Hannah was excited that she knew what was going on already.