You don’t need fancy qualifications to teach your children about science. Science blogger Nanogirl, aka Dr Michelle Dickinson, is a nanotechnologist – working with very small things.
She’s also the author of a recipe book for parents and children called The Kitchen Science Cookbook, to teach children about cooking and science at the same time. She’s got some great tips for getting your kids into science at home even if you didn’t like or do well at the subject at school!
Here are two fun experiments you can try at home!
1. Exploring sound waves
“Be curious and go on a discovery adventure with your children to find out. Don’t worry if you get it wrong.
“One example of this is to work out how sound waves work. If you take two metal spoons, you tie a piece of string to the neck of one, and then wrap the string around your fingers, put the string inside your ears and get the child to tap the spoon and hear what you can hear, you’ll be very surprised. Switch places and discuss why you think it sounds different.
“Don’t panic if you don’t know, you can go on an adventure to find out. But it’s super fun.”
2. Make edible earthworms in the kitchen
“It’s basically jelly worms that look like worms so you can eat them. They look disgusting but they teach your children about how things turn from a liquid into a solid.
“What you’re going to need is some red jelly, strawberry or cherry, a couple of drops of green food colouring to make the jelly go brown. If you like, you can add a bit of cream as well as the water because that takes them from transparent to opaque but you don’t have to, especially if your children are allergic to dairy.
“Take some plastic straws…hold them upright, tie a rubber band [around them] and put them into a tall glass. Now I know people think plastic straws are bad, but we’re not going to throw these away, you’re going to reuse them.
“Pour your jelly mixture onto the top [of the straws], put them in the fridge overnight and let them sit.
“The next day it’s going to be very exciting. You’re going to take out the straws, and you’re going to squeeze out the jelly, and out is going to shoot what looks like a jelly earthworm.
“My favourite thing to do after this is to take some chocolate cookies and crumble them onto the plate to look like soil and then you have worms in soil!
“Great fun for kids, it teaches them about the anatomy of worms, how things turn from a liquid into a solid and they also get to eat them in the end.”
The awesome Kitchen Science Cookbook Live! team will be at STEMFest on 12 October 2019. Be sure to get your FREE tickets.
Original article published on the bbc.co.uk website and republished with the kind permission of Dr. Michelle Dickinson.