Let me begin by saying that I think that for small people, every week is science week. Dumping water out of the bath on to the floor for the thousandth time to check that water still goes down. Throwing all their rice from their dinner in the air to see what happens.

Discussing why does the moon sometimes look like a circle and sometimes like a half circle? Patiently waiting for a strawberry in the garden to turn ripe. Besides all that though, this week in National Science Week in Australia, so we’re trying to  be even more science-y than normal.

This week we are planning to see how celery can be dyed by putting it in coloured water, inspired by some rainbow roses from the markets.

Another activity which was surprisingly popular recently was “what will a magnet stick to?” and talking about metals. There was also a bag of ice cubes that we took into daycare and the kids reportedly watched melt for the afternoon, passing around the gradually melting bag of water and talking about how what temperature it felt.

The CSIRO website has science activities to try out, mostly suited towards older kids although we have tried out their cornflour slime which fascinated the adults in this household and got a “that’s not REAL slime” from the child.

There’s some more toddler ideas over here at Happy Hooligans which I think we will try out soon. I did try the baking soda and vinegar volcano a while ago, and will repeat that again soon because it was pretty fun, although our main learning from that was that vinegar and baking soda combined will kill the grass.