Catapult Paper Airplanes

We are definitely fan of the paper airplane here. We've done Strawplanes, oversized planes, and dragon planes. Well here's a new one to try - catapult plane from Minieco that they saw in The Usborne Big Book of Science Things to Make and Do. Add a rubberband (and some tape or cardboard for stability to the bottom of your plane) and see how it affects your launch!

Let me know how it goes if you try it out soon!

OPTICAL ILLUSIONS

A lot of times when I tell the boys I want to show them something cool it usually sarts with "Do I have to?" or "I guess" but if it ends with a smile or a "that's cool!" I call it a success. Never judge by the first reaction!

Here are a couple of fun, quick optical illusion tricks that requires very little. These are good for a restaurant or a time when the kids need to sit still.

For the first one hold your index fingers up in front of your face with a little bit of space between them (not touching your face)

Look at your fingers and then adjust your focus to something across the room. What do your fingers look like now? You should see a third floating finger!

He sees it :)

For the next one you'll need a tube of some sort. We used a paper towel roll but you could just roll up a piece of paper too.

Hold the roll up to one eye like a telescope and look at something through it. Slowly bring your other hand next to the roll like the picture. (This hand is not covering your eye there is some space in between) What do you see? It looks like there is a hole in your hand and that you are looking right through it!

(He had to come try it out too) Keep these in your "back pocket" for the perfect time.

Heavy Water

I saw this drink on Pinterest

Source: thesisterscafe.com via Robin on Pinterest

 But didn't want to go out and buy a bunch of sugary drinks so we made our own little experiment with salt.

2 cups of water, salt, food coloring, and a piece of paper were our tools.

Fill one cup with some salt (to make the water "heavier")

and the other with a few drops of food coloring.

A paper on top will keep the water from spilling all over the place. I had to help at this point since no one else was home!

Slide the paper out. We haven't perfected this move yet so we did it over the sink and did lose a bit of the water, but you get the point

He thought it was pretty cool and wanted to talk about why they weren't mixing together. I suggest trying this one over the sink or a big  bowl until you master the slipping out the paper - maybe cardboard would work better?

Balloon Fun

We have a birthday here this week so balloons are a must! Somehow they just make everything seem more festive! My friend Jennifer Cooper over at Classic Play posted some fun ways to turn balloons into a super cool toy!

I kind of want to try the yoyo first! 

Phone App + Nature

 

Hi, I'm Jen! I blog over at plainvanillamom.com. I am a mom of four,  ages 11, 9, 7 & 8 months. The 11 & 9 year old are actually my "bonus kids" but we all have the same amount of fun! You can read about all of our goings on over at plainvanillamom.com. I post a lot about what we are doing with the babes because, well lets face it, he's my captive audience while everyone else in the family is off at school or work. My personal hobbies fall into two categories…baking & photography and you will find a bit of both on the blog as well. I'd love to have you stop by and say hi!

Have you ever heard of the app Leafsnap? I hadn't. My seven year old actually introduced me to it. He learned about it through his Uncle. I must admit I sometimes cringe when my child picks up his iPod, but this is an app that I can actually get behind.  If you are unfamiliar with leafsnap here's a little snippet from their website, if you want to learn more about it I recommend a visit there. 

Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides being developed by researchers from Columbia University, theUniversity of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution. This free mobile app uses visual recognition software to help identify tree species from photographs of their leaves.

There is so much I love about this app! Mr A has had so much fun with it already that I had to share.  If you have older kids like ours that like to explore and investigate I suspect this will be a hit.  It gets the kids outside connecting with nature, and learning about it all the while.

The idea is you take pictures of different leaves (against a white background please)

Then it scans the leafsnap database to find possible matches.

Scroll through the results and match your leaf specimens up. When you find what you believe to be the right match you can label your specimen and add it to your "collection". 

For every specimen you can click to read more about the type of tree that it is.  You can see different pictures of what the leaves and flowers of the tree look like, learn about what areas of the country it is native to, what the bark of the tree looks like, and so forth. 

My little botanist is looking forward to growing his leaf collection throughout the summer!

Goop!

Want to know how to make one of our favorite messy goopy recipes?

Go check out our post at The Fort magazine today. It's SUPER easy and not bad to clean up either! If you haven't made this before - you must try it!

Triangle Plane

I know we have lots of airplane fans here (especially the strawplane) so I thought we'd try out a new kind of paper airplane - the Triangle Plane.

I found a tutorial here on Instructables. So we tried it out for you. You just need a standard 8.5"x11" sheet of paper and some tape.

First fold the paper the long way, hot dog, enchilada whatever you want to call it. Like this:

Then fold it the other way (taco, hamburger)

Then you'll need to open up that fold and take the outsides and fold them into the center fold you just made so that you're making 4 sections.

Then you unfold the paper entirely. You're going to take one end and fold it down about 1/4" or so.

Continue folding it over and over until it reaches the center crease.

Then you're going to shape your paper into a triangle using the creases you made as a guide, creasing the folds so that it's nice and straight.

A bit of tape to secure the 2 sides that are on top of each other (the "bottom" of the triangle)

And that's it!

To through you want to hold the "bottom" of the triangle and slightly squeeze together and toss. This one takes a bit of practice to get going good.

It has similar physics to our paper football. It's not our favorite plane but it's fun to try out different kinds and race! I had a reader email to tell me that her kids had a paper airplane race/competition one day (I lost the email so if it's you shout it out in the comments!) That would be fun to try! My son also said it would be fun to decorate.

Happy flying!

Sticky Ice Science

Hi Everyone! Today I'm guest posting over at The Fort magazine blog with a super quick easy litle science experiment that my boys wanted to share. Hope to see you there!

Back tomorrow with another Fort Friday!