Although true winter was still three days off, as we know now thanks to the magic of hindsight, Thursday was a bit wintery and greyish feeling. Though it was warm and sunny, something about it felt very…. January. Maybe we could feel the cold snap that was about to roll in from the west.

The night before, I had flipped through science experiment cards from Usborne Books that my mom had given Neko for Christmas, and picked out a couple of projects for the day.

50 Science Things to Make and Do – science experiment cards from Usborne Books

I realized, as I was getting the supplies ready, that these were both going to be really nice, bright, colourful activities! This made me happy.

The first was musical bottles. We all did this as kids, and I was excited to revisit it. Neko helped me dig through our recycling for glass bottles, and we filled them to varying levels with water. I apologize for what will appear to be a bright, shiny Coca Cola ad. My husband has a habit. We added food colouring to the water so that we had a full spectrum of bottles.

As it turned out, only Mairead was really interested in this. Neko and Finn were each off doing their own things. But that’s okay. Mairead, Andie (our Australian visitor) and I spent quite a while experimenting with blowing across the mouths of the bottles, tapping them in different spots with different materials (metal, wood) and arranging the bottles by colour, size and water level.

Our rainbow of musical bottles

Mairead took to the musical aspect and decided that she would like to perform a concert for Nicole (her mom) when she came to pick her up later that day. Mairead spent a lot of time practicing so it would be just right.

Mairead practices her concert in preparation for performing for her mom later.

Still practicing.

Our next activity was planting seeds. Neko and I picked out seeds from our dry food storage the night before – we chose dry kidney beans, black beans, chickpeas, barley and peanuts. Each child got two small Mason jars, into which we stuffed colour tissue paper. The card called for napkins, but we don’t have paper napkins. I love the colours the kids chose – each of them ended up with two jars with layers of brightly coloured paper. After watering the paper down, we stuffed various seeds around the edges, between the paper and the jar.

The kids’ seed jars

The jars will live in a warm, dark cupboard until the seeds sprout, at which point we will move them to a sunny spot so the sprouts can grow. Hopefully I will post a photo once the sprouts are growing!

Edited to add photos:

Our big plants! Check it out!