Growing crystals (hopefully!)

We've had an unplanned day at home today.  We were going to meet up with my mum but we  moved it to the end of the week.  I dug around to see if I could find anything the kids fancied doing, as the weather was looking too dismal for the playground or the woods.

I sometimes get an online magazine called Alphabet Glue and it has lots of ideas for cool things to do, and lots of printable resources.  They have a straight forward tutorial for growing crystals using string and a bicarbonate of soda solution.  I haven't replenished our bicarb stock, but wondered if a salt solution might work.  

Freddie was keen to work on the experiment.  It took *a lot* of salt to make a saturated solution.

Once the solution was ready, Fred added some food colouring so that we would grow red crystals.

Fred poured the solution into the glasses, and added the string.
Meg helped me to make a sugar solution, so we could see if they grow differently to salt crystals.  I hope one (or both) of them work!

Meg is heavily into Fireman Sam at the moment.  Today she and Betsy played with the emergency vehicles for ages.  We have a Playmobil fire engine and ambulance, and a Fireman Sam fire engine that Freddie got when he was little.

I found Freddie a new game for the Nexus.  It's a shark game, and he gets the shark to swim about and eat stuff.  Right up Fred's street!

I found another idea from Alphabet Glue - story machines.  They are printed box templates that you make up, and fill with a very long narrow strip of rolled up paper, like ticker tape.  You pull the paper out to see what is written on it.

Alphabet Glue suggests you write a story on the paper strip, but as neither Fred or Betsy are writing yet we came up with something different.  Betsy drew a picture on hers.  I wrote jokes on the other one and gave it to Fred as a joke machine.  He read most of it himself, except where my writing was too sloppy!