24 Sep, 2012
A bit about some squishy marble things
Posted by andrea tomkins in: Easy ways to make kids happy|Oh! Things!
My spare time has been filled with shopping for our reno. There is still so much to do. This past week it was about lighting fixtures. We have almost everything we need, including an amazing ceiling fan we picked up from a store called Northern Fan.
Sidebar: Twitter rocks. We wouldn’t have known about this shop otherwise!
We do however, need something for our dining room. Sadly Mark and I can’t seem to agree on anything. Gah.
Anyway, I need to focus on other things before my brain explodes. Things like squishy marbles.
These came from a test-tube science kit we picked up at Tag Along Toys in Kanata. (Tag Along is a Fishbowl patron and we are big fans of this great little store.)
The test-tube science kits are all pretty cool. I like them because they give us an opportunity to do something a little different with the kids.
This particular one was called Garbled Marbles, and I believe the package said something about expanding polymers. (It’s up to you if you really want to use these to illustrate basic scientific principals but we totally glossed over it.)
The girls followed the instructions and set it all up themselves. It was pretty easy. All they had to do was put the tiny multicoloured pellets in a large bowl of water. When we checked in on them a few hours later we realized they’d expanded – a lot.
Some of them were totally transparent too – totally invisible if they were separated and placed in a glass of water. And oh, it was so neat to run my hands through these gummy-like slippery things:
It’s the perfect thing for kids who are super sensory. (Er, as long as they don’t eat them of course.)
Even cleaning up was kind of fun. We admired them for a couple of weeks and eventually decided to strain them and lay them out on a tray to let them dry. (New science lesson in evaporation!) When they had returned to their original state we decided to see how many we could fit on a quarter, just for fun:
And the best thing? They’re reusable too. Cool eh?
