Every week we do school, we plan on doing a preschool/Kindergarten aged-appropriate science experiment to help everyone dip their toes into the different studies of science. At this stage we can also introduce the concept of the Scientific Method, so that forming a hypothesis, testing, observation, etc, become second nature before we're even at the stage of using those words to describe what we are doing. The husband is the designated "Science Teacher" of the family to not only get him more involved on a regular basis with their education, but also because he is the more Math/Science-minded person in the family (we're fortunate that we balance each other out that way).
For our first experiment, we used a family day trip to the shore as the perfect place to study buoyancy and density. From home we brought two buckets, a gallon of fresh water, a bag of items to test, and a chart for each kid to fill out during the experiment. During a lull in the crabbing that was going on, my husband gave them a basic description of Buoyancy and Density (which was not entirely foreign to them as they were familiar with some of the concepts from watching Blue's Clues: Boat Float - we supplement with this particular show a lot you'll see). Then they guessed and we tested and recorded the buoyancy of each object in the fresh water. Then we filled the second bucket with salt water from the bay and we repeated the experiment - this time seeing if the outcome was the same or different.
The experiment can be done studying only buoyancy with fresh water at home.
Materials:
2 buckets
Water
Sea Water
Recording Chart (we hand drew one)
Something for writing results
Items to test (ex: wooden block, screw, quarter, spoon, plastic spoon, matchbox car, bath toy, etc)
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