psocoptera

Project: How Much Does It Weigh?
Materials: digital kitchen scale, small toys
Explanatory details: Junie put different toys on the scale and helped me read their weights while I wrote them down.
How did it go: Good! She had noticed the scale in the pantry and was curious about it and so was interested in getting to use it.
Things we talked about: The idea that we could use these numbers to tell which toys weighed the same and which were lightest and heaviest. I told her which of the toys we'd picked out was the heaviest (a wooden avocado) and asked if she could go find something even heavier, which she did on her second try, the heavy wooden bowl of her stir-fry set (I think the first try she just got enthused about something else she spotted and didn't really think about whether it might be heavier). We talked about how the heavier toys were made of wood, rather than plastic, but the lightest toy (an alphabet block) was also wood.
What Junie got out of it: Practice reading digital numbers! We recently bought her a clock for her room and discovered that digital numbers are harder to read than numbers in nice typefaces in books. Also an introduction to the idea of making comparative measurements. This is obviously an idea for a somewhat older tiny than she was when we first started science.