CHAPTER 17 Investigating and Interacting with the World

Your child’s first experiences with science may not look like much at all, but once he starts making observations about and trying to actively make changes in his environment, he’s begun the process of scientific discovery. At first this is a matter of using his senses to find new and exciting ways to investigate and interact with the world around him. The activities in this chapter provide some ways for you to encourage a budding scientist.

Scratch and Sniff Painting

Part of interacting with the world is discovering how your senses can come together to make an experience more powerful. While simple painting is appealing to your child’s visual sense (and sense of touch if he finger-paints), the Scratch and Sniff Painting activity incorporates his sense of smell, too. The two different kinds of paint here are easy enough to make with ingredients you probably already have around the house, and your child will be able to see and smell the beauty of his accomplishment when he’s done.

The gelatin and drink mix paints below both have advantages and disadvantages. Paint made with powdered drink mix has a stronger smell and provides more vibrant colors, but is also more likely to stain clothes. Gelatin paint needs to be mixed with glue and food coloring to get the right consistency and vibrancy, but it has the added dimension of a tactile sensory experience.

Skills Being Practiced

Fine motor skills
Sensory awareness

What You Need

Powdered drink mix packets in bright colors (orange, red, blue, purple, etc.)
Water
Food coloring
Powdered gelatin dessert mix (such as Jell-O) in varying colors and flavors
School glue
Small cups
Paintbrushes
Heavyweight paper (watercolor paper is best, but you can use card stock or construction paper)
Pencil
Permanent marker

Get Ready to Play: How to Make Drink Mix Paint

Put one or two packages of each color of drink mix in a plastic cup. Slowly add water to the cup, stirring as you go until the mix is the right thickness and color that you desire. If you wish, you can add a little white glue to thicken the mixture.

Get Ready to Play: How to Make Gelatin Paint

Using a separate plastic cup for each color, combine 2 tablespoons of gelatin powder with 2 tablespoons of warm water. If you wish to make the color a little bit brighter, add a drop or two of food coloring. Stir the mixture, then add 4–5 drops of glue, and stir again. The glue helps the granules stick to the paper, making the painting not only scented but “scratchable” as well.
If your child is using gelatin paint, the granules may separate and sink to the bottom of the cup. After he’s finished painting, have your child sweep his paintbrush against the bottom of the cup to get a number of granules in the remaining paint and then dab them on the painted areas to maximize the scratch and sniff effect.

How to Play

Ask your child to think about things that are brightly colored and have a strong, pleasant smell, like flowers or his favorite kinds of fruit.
Give your child a piece of watercolor paper and pencil, and ask him to sketch out a drawing of some of those things. If he’s having trouble, consider putting together a bowl of fruit or a vase of flowers for him to use as a model.
When he is certain he has finished his drawing, help him trace the pencil lines with a permanent marker. (Nonpermanent markers will run when mixed with water.) This will help outline the areas so he can apply different colors of paint.
Put out the cups of scented paint and a few paintbrushes. Let your child sniff the different cups and choose which scent he thinks is most appropriate for each part of his drawing. Let him use the paintbrushes to create his masterpiece.
When he’s done, lay the paper flat to dry, a process that may take a little longer than with regular paint. When the painting is dry, all he has to do is rub his fingers over the painted surface or scratch the gelatin granules to activate the scratch and sniff paint.

Sour, Sweet, Salty, or Bitter?

Your child probably has some favorite foods and other foods she’d rather never eat again, but she may not know what words to use to categorize those foods. A taste test is not only a fun way to figure out which parts of her tongue are sensitive to which tastes, but it is also a good way to help her learn about the different types of flavors such as sour, salty, sweet, and bitter. Typically, people taste sweet on the tip of the tongue, sour on the back sides, salty on the front sides, and bitter on the back. Other senses help create a fuller sensory experience, allowing you to taste more complicated flavors. A taste test is also a good way to ease into learning the basic steps of the scientific method, or the order in which things are done to conduct an experiment or observations.

Skills Being Practiced

Sensory observation
Identifying tastes
Taste-related vocabulary
Taste bud mapping

What You Need

White paper
Red pencil
Black marker
Plastic cups
Water
Sugar
Salt
Lemon juice
Tonic water
Toothpicks or craft sticks
Blindfold

Create a Hypothesis

Before you begin your experiment, explain to your child that you are going to try a variety of different tastes placed directly on her tongue. Introduce the words salty, sweet, sour, and bitter, giving her an example of a type of food that fits into each category.
Have your child stick her tongue out and look at it in the mirror. Ask: What do you think those bumps all over your tongue are for? Do you know what the bumps are called? Why do you think they’re called taste buds?
Now ask her to give some thought as to what happens to her tongue when she eats her favorite foods and her least favorite foods. Then ask her to hypothesize, or make a good guess, as to what she will find out about her tongue and the different tastes. Her statement will be the hypothesis, or the idea she is testing. (Be aware that in order to map her taste buds, your child will be placing toothpicks or craft sticks on all areas of her tongue, including the back of her tongue. This can trigger a gag reflex in some people. If your child has an easily triggered gag reflex, consider volunteering to be the taste tester, and let your child be the recorder.)

How to Play (Part 1)

Give your child a piece of white paper and a red pencil. Ask her to draw a big tongue on her paper, but not to color it in yet. Set the paper aside.
Set up four plastic cups, placing each one of top of a piece of paper. Pour a little lemon juice (sour) into the first cup, and a little tonic water (bitter) into the second cup. For the last two cups, mix up sugar water and salt water, making sure they are very sweet and very salty. Label the paper underneath each cup with the name of the liquid in it, not with the taste.
Give your child some toothpicks or craft sticks, and ask her to dip one into one of the liquids. Have her place the stick on the tip of her tongue. Does she taste anything? If so, what taste is it?
Dip it again, and repeat this on the sides, flat surface, and back of the tongue. Once she has identified the taste and found where on her tongue the taste is the strongest, have her write the name of the taste—not the liquid—in the corresponding space on her tongue drawing
Allow your child to rinse her mouth with some water, and repeat this process with the rest of the liquids.
Have her fill in the “tongue map,” writing in all the tastes. If she wishes, she can draw taste buds, and color the tongue reddish pink to make it more realistic.

How to Play (Part 2)

Tell your child that it’s time to test if her other senses play a part in how and where she detects tastes on her tongue. Explain that you are going to blindfold her, and you will be handing her the various tastes to place on her tongue this time. If she gets a little nervous, reassure her she’s safe and you will narrate everything you’re going to do.
Sit your child in a chair, and place the blindfold over her eyes. Dip a stick into one of the liquids, explaining to her what you are doing. Tell her that you want her to see if she can identify the liquid and taste without your help. Give her the stick, and ask her to roll it around her tongue. Can she identify the liquid? How about the taste?
Let her rinse her mouth, and repeat this with the rest of the liquids.
Remove the blindfold, and have her do the tests while pinching her nose shut, too.

Questions to Ask

Did the experiments answer the question you posed as your hypothesis? Why or why not?
On what areas of your tongue were you able to detect bitter tastes? Sour? Sweet? Salty?
Are there any areas of your tongue on which you could detect two different tastes?
Are there areas on your tongue on which you could not detect any tastes at all?
Do you think this is the same for everyone? How could you test that theory?
When you were blindfolded, were you nervous about what you were going to taste?
Was it harder or easier to identify tastes while blindfolded?
Did things taste better or worse without being able to see?
Was there a difference when you had your nose pinched shut? What was it?

EXTEND THE LEARNING

Reinforce the idea of taste bud zones. Allow your child to map your tongue as you taste the different liquids.

Activities to Improve Fine Motor Skills

Your child uses his fine motor skills every day to perform basic tasks like tying his shoes, zipping his coat, or even brushing his teeth. In addition to that, fine motor skills play an important role in helping your child investigate the world around him. Fine motor control doesn’t always come easily, so incorporating fine motor practice into everyday exploration activities helps your child discover the world around him as well as practice those skills.

Skills Being Practiced

Basic fine motor skills
Writing
Fine motor control
Using scissors
Pencil grip
Sensory investigation

What You Need

(not all materials are needed for all activities)

Kid-safe scissors and/or plastic knife
Old newspapers, junk mail, and scrap paper
Clay or Play-Doh
Small plastic toys, beads, or coins
Tweezers
Rice
O-shaped cereal
Small plastic bowls
Water
Eyedropper or medicine dropper
Silly Putty
Markers
Tape

How to Play: Drawing the Line

Writing and drawing requires a lot of fine motor control, and not just because it’s hard to hold a writing instrument correctly. Drawing a straight line and imitating written patterns can be tough, too. If your child has trouble gripping a pencil, start him off with markers or a chunky crayon. If your school-age child is still using an immature or inefficient pencil grasp, get some advice from an occupational therapist as to how to help modify the grasp before it’s too ingrained. Such grips include a fisted grip in which the entire hand is wrapped around the pencil, or a five-fingered grip in which all the fingers are holding on to the pencil.

Get a book of dot-to-dot puzzles for your child. He will have to practice motor planning and sequencing to get from number to number in addition to drawing the lines.
Set up a chalkboard or whiteboard easel, and ask your child to just practice drawing lines from the top to the bottom of the board. (If you don’t have an easel, tape a big piece of paper to the wall at your child’s eye level.) After he has a handle on top-to-bottom lines, have him practice drawing lines from left to right.
Play a cooperative drawing game. On a piece of drawing paper, draw a simple line, a shape, or a more complicated line (curves, waves, spikes, etc.). Take turns adding a new line or shape to the existing one to create a new drawing. Continue this until there’s no more room on the paper.

How to Play: Putty Hide-and-Seek

Place small plastic toys, beads, or coins inside balls of putty, making sure to squish them in well enough that your child cannot see the items.
Give your child the putty and ask him to hold a ball of it in one hand while he uses the fingers on the other hand to pull it apart to find the hidden items.
Try putting new little toys in the putty so when your child uncovers them he gets the “prize” of having new toys to play with.

How to Play: Play Clay

You can get in some fine motor practice while your child is playing with clay or Play-Doh, and he probably won’t even know it. Encourage him to roll balls and snakes between his palms or ask him to make tiny little balls between his forefingers and thumbs to help work on strengthening his fingers.
To help your child learn to coordinate the muscles in his hands to use tools, consider letting him cut through slabs of play clay with an old pair of scissors or a plastic knife. If you’re really brave, and think he won’t generalize the skill to people, you can also show him how to “pinch” the clay.

How to Play: Newspaper-Trashcan Ball

Challenge your child to a game of newspaper-trashcan basketball with the stipulation that he has to make a new “ball” for each throw. Give him an old newspaper and ask him to separate it into single sheets.
Once it’s all separated, show him how to place a sheet in the palm of his hand and crumple it up to make a tight ball. If he uses both hands to make the ball, he loses his turn.

How to Play: Household Helping

The next time you’re dusting or cleaning with window cleaner, fill an empty spray bottle with some water and let your child “help” you clean. Designate him as the official window cleaner or plant sprayer. He may get water everywhere, but it takes a lot of fine motor effort to pull the trigger of a spray bottle.

Ideas to Cut, Twist, and Tear

Sometimes what looks like utter destruction can actually be educational. Tearing, twisting, and cutting are all great ways to give your child’s fine motor skills a workout.

Show your child how to rip newspaper into strips. Have him place his hands side by side on the top of the page, with his thumbs on one side of the page and his fingers on the other side. Have him hold on tight and pull his hands in opposite directions (one toward and one away from him). The paper should tear right down the middle.
Twist the strips into “logs.” Have your child collect the newspaper strips. Take one strip of paper and ask him to hold it horizontally, with one hand on each end. He should use the same grip as he did when tearing the paper, but instead of pulling in opposite directions, now he needs to twist in opposite directions. (It should look like he’s wringing out a towel.) If he twists hard enough—letting go and resetting his grip as needed—the strips will turn into tight, twisted “logs.”
Create a human shredding machine. Give your child a pair of kid-safe scissors and your junk mail or old papers you no longer need. Tell him this is stuff you don’t want anymore and he can cut them into pieces, using straight cuts, curvy cuts, or even just making fringes on the edges. Since the goal is to help your child’s scissor grip, correct his grip if need be and remind him to turn the scissors, not the paper, when he cuts.

How to Play: Miniature Races

You and your child may have played relay games before, but they probably involved running and large objects. While those types of races are great to help gross motor development, in order to work on fine motor skills, your relay races have to be on a smaller scale. Here are a few to try out.

The Rice Race. Divide a handful of rice into two small plastic bowls or cups. Give one cup and a pair of tweezers to your child, and keep the other and a pair of tweezers for yourself. Put an empty bowl between you and use the tweezers to transfer the rice to the empty cup. The first to get rid of all his rice wins the race. If rice is too hard for your child, you can substitute O-shaped cereal.
The Teeny Tiny Water Race. Fill two cups about one-quarter full with water. Give each participant a cup of water, an empty cup, and an eyedropper or medicine dropper. The first player who transfers all the water from one cup to the other is the winner.

Make a Coat Hanger Scale

Part of investigating the world includes seeing how things are related, even if it isn’t obvious. Sometimes, the way to relate objects to one another is to see how many of one object is equal to one of another. For instance, your child can get a sense of how heavy a blue whale is if he knows a grown whale weighs about the same as 15 school buses. However, since you don’t have blue whales, school buses, or the capacity to weigh either in your house, it’s probably better to stick to your child’s toys. Making a Coat Hanger Scale gives him an easy way to compare items.

Skills Being Practiced

Comparing and contrasting
Estimating
Measuring

What You Need

Notched plastic hanger
Yarn
Single-hole punch
2 identical paper cups
Scissors
Measuring tape
Masking tape

Get Ready to Play: Making the Scale

Cut two pieces of yarn, each about 2 feet long. Make sure they are exactly the same length.
On both of the paper cups, make a mark just below the rim on opposites sides of the cup. Try to make the marks in the same places on each cup. Use a single-hole punch to make holes where you made the marks.
Locate a notched plastic hanger (the kind which has indents in the top for hanging items with straps). Hang it on a doorknob, cup hook in the wall, or on something like a metal clothes drying rack.
Poke one end of a piece of yarn through one hole in one of the cups. Tie a small knot on the end inside the cup so it doesn’t slip out of the hole. Loop the string around the side and over the top of the hanger, letting it rest in one of the notches. Pull the yarn down the back of the hanger and poke the other end of the yarn through the other hole in the cup. Tie another knot.
Do the same with the other cup, but place it on the other end of the hanger. Make sure the cups hang at the same level. If they do not, you may have to retie the yarn to make the cups even.
Let the cups settle into place. When they are no longer swinging and look even, use a small piece of masking tape to hold each piece of yarn in place in the notches of the hanger.
Demonstrate to your child how the balance scale works by placing a penny in each cup, then adding another penny to one of the cups. He should see the “scale” tip in the direction of the cup with two pennies in it.

How to Play

Now it’s time to let your child loose with the scale. Let him explore with his toys to see how it works, and then ask him to start exploring with a little more direction. Prompt him with questions like:

What can you use as common unit of measurement? (Answer: pennies, marbles, or anything else that is a constant weight.)
How can you tell which item is heavier?
Why do you think the cups move up and down?
Does it matter where you put the hanger? Why?
How many pennies does a toy car weigh?
How many pennies does an action figure weigh?
Is a penny heavier or lighter than a Barbie shoe?