When PBS changed the morning line up of shows back in October we had a major problem.  M was used to waking up every morning and watching Arthur and Curious George while eating breakfast, and then all of a sudden, Arthur was a half hour earlier, followed by Martha Speaks (a queer show about a dog who can talk because she eats vegetable soup) and THEN Curious George.  (That's just WAY too much TV nonsense for us in the morning!)  And then, for our viewing pleasure, PBS threw in two new shows; Sid the Science Kid, and Super Why, both of which M adores when he is lucky enough to be allowed to watch them.

In the beginning I liked Sid the Science Kid, now I just find it annoying.  The songs pierce though my ears and make my brain bleed, and it kills me that 4-year-old Sid isn't in the right kind of car seat in his Grandmother's car, but the science topics are pretty cool.  M is completely enthralled with the show so it gave me an idea.

I proposed a new class to my boss at the YMCA; a Young Explorers science class for preschool age children.  She liked the idea and I was psyched!  I really miss teaching preschool and all the stuff it involves, so this was a very happy medium for me.

So, today was my first day teaching the science class.  My happiness was a little shrouded by the fact that I currently only have 3 kids in my class, one is M, one is my niece T, and the other is one of T's friends, a little girl named Allie.

I, ideally, would have liked at least  5 kids, but things worked really well for the first class.  Our theme was mixing colors, so we read the book Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh, sang a color mixing song (Red and yellow always make orange...) and then came the really fun (aka messy) part!  We used eye droppers on coffee filters with primary colored water to make beautiful tie-dyed looking patterns.  The kids marveled at the colors as they mixed together and LOVED the end result.  When they were finished, we mixed all the colors together and ended up with a murky brown that they found pretty fascinating.

After our color mixing experiment, we sat and sorted a bag full of miscellaneous items that I had brought by colors.  Some of them were difficult to sort because they had more than one color, so it was interesting to see how they decided which item made it into which pile.  After sorting, we used the piles to make a graph of how many of each color we had.  They each took a turn coloring in one color of the graph and then we discussed the outcome.  It was so fun!

We finished up the class by "writing" about our experiences in our science journals.  The 2 girls did a nice job drawing and writing about the class, M, on the other hand, just colored his page yellow (his new favorite color) and stated, "I used yellow!!".  It was pretty cute.  Overall, I'd say the class was a success!

At home, we decided that Tuesdays are going to be science days.  We pulled out our brand new science book (we focused strongly on history from August until December) and started with the first experiment. 

Our first lesson was about osmosis, and the experiment was to "grow" a gummy bear in a cup of water.  We measured (all of us, the boys included!) the bears before submerging them, drew pictures of them, made predictions, and took notes.  M, again, just colored his paper yellow and called it "a gummy bear".

We were supposed to wait overnight to see results, but it became apparent rather quickly that things were not going to end well for our little wet bears.  Rather than expand like we were led to believe, they have started dissolving in the water.  We researched the experiment and it seems like we did it correctly, so I don't know what we are doing wrong.  If we didn't chow down on the remainder of the bag of bears, we could try the experiment again, but alas, those bears never stood a chance!  We are going to pick up another bag tomorrow and try again in a few different ways; less water, salt water, distilled water, etc.  It will give the kids something cool to document and I am curious to see the results.  It should be interesting!

So, that was our day.   Please note me making good (so far) on my New Year's Resolution to blog more frequently. (I am doing well on all the other fronts too!)