I Only Believe in Science

That title will only make sense to those who've seen and appreciate the humor in Nacho Libre. I'm on a Nacho kick today . . .

So this week was the kids' Science O Rama at school.

Science O Rama is such a funny name for the kids' science fair - it makes me think of Chuck A Rama - are those still around in Utah? Good old Chuck A Rama. (o:

So Anyways (as Nacho Libre would say) -

We had a very busy week. Ahem . . . I had a very busy week. And I learned a very big lesson. What is that lesson, you say?

Don't wait until the last minute to do a science fair project. That is the lesson my friends.

Because if you do, you might end up staying up until 2:00 in the morning finishing up your child's lovely science fair board. So take it from me - procrastination stinks!

In my defense, I had no idea the part of actually putting all the "stuff" on the board would take HOURS. Yes, that's right, HOURS. Getting every little thing matted and figuring out where to place everything and making it look nice is very time consuming. (I am a little of a perfectionist, mind you.) But I have to say, I think they turned out pretty nice.

The saddest part is that because I did so much in the middle of the night, Sarah and Natalie didn't get to help much with the assembly like I imagined. On the other hand, if they would have been helping then it would have taken DAYS. (o: Next time, we're starting much earlier!

This one was Natalie's project. We hid Twilight's "stinky" food in the family room in different places and timed her to see how long it would take her to find it. We did three series of playing this game. The first time, we played 5 times in a row with no break. (Hiding the food in the same location, but changing location between series.) Then we waited for a few hours and played again waiting 5 minutes between the 5 searches. Then we waited another while before playing a last time - waiting 10 minutes between the 5 searches. The more time we spread between the "hide and treat" game, the longer it seemed to take Twilight to find her food. We had fun making the little charts at the bottom of the board. Natalie did these by hand (with my help) and I think she did a great job. I also love her picture she did on the left side. Natalie was one of only three Kindergartners who participated in the science fair. Her teacher was so cute and let Natalie present her board to the class. She made Natalie feel so special for doing her scientific research! (o: (See picture below of Natalie's presentation.)
I mentioned Sarah's experiment in an earlier post and here is her board. Daddy helped do some lovely graph's at the bottom, that turned out really nice. I think I already mentioned what Sarah did, but I'll review once more for our memory's sake (since this is our little family history). Sarah watered 5 plants with various liquids including milk, sugar water, lime drink, salt water and plain old water. We were surprised how well the milk and sugar water did. They actually grew better than the water sample until the very end of the two weeks. Surprise - the lime drink and salt water killed off the plants rather quickly!
On the left side of the board is the part of the experiment where Sarah watered white violas with colored water to see if they would turn colors (just like when you put cut carnations in a vase with colored water). After two weeks, there was no color. So, we concluded that the color molecules must not be able to travel through the root system. (Or they need to be watered for longer with the colored water.)
On the right side of the board we showed what happens when you water plants with various amounts of water. The more water the plants got, the taller they grew! However, the most watered plant had fewer flowers.


Sarah and Natalie were so excited and proud to have boards up at the science fair. That made the very late night catching up worth every minute. Apparently, Sarah's board will get to go to district, which she is TOTALLY excited about. I'm hoping maybe Natalie's will go too (I haven't heard the official results) because she will be sad if not. But that's the way it goes sometimes.

Another bonus for the science night was that OMSI came to the school and did some cool experiments and had some great displays and things for the kids to do and play with during the night.

One other little note that I am proud of . . . some of you might remember from our past e-mailings of the family Post that last spring I held a "Science Girls" club at our house every week. I was so proud to find out that Sarah's good friends, Monica and Taylor, who were in the club, both did science projects for the fair too. Not that it was all because of me - but the whole reason I did the little "club" was to help the girls feel confident in their abilities and excited about science. I loved looking at what Monica and Taylor worked on - they did awesome! It got me motivated to start up our little club again this summer. They've been asking all year...

Yeah for science! (o: