A little fun

A few weeks ago, Kiddo asked me how many Dixie Cups I thought it would take to equal a "big kid" cup. I asked him what he thought. He didn't know (hence he was asking me, duh, mom!). Then I asked him how he thought we might be able to find out. He didn't know, so I told him to think about it.

He thought about it for a while. He came up with a couple of ideas, but as we talked about them, it didn't seem as though they would get us to the information we were looking for. He brought it up again last weekend. We talked about it a little, and then decided it might be easier to try some ideas!

We first gathered our materials. I had Kiddo write down what we needed. I used the cake pan as a tray to catch the water spills, which are inevitable with this kind of thing! I filled the watering can with water and we went to work. I wrote down several questions that we wanted to answer such as "How many Dixie cups does it take to fill a "big kid" cup (the "big kid" cup is the small green one)? I then had Kiddo estimate before we started. Then we tested his estimation. We also got to compare the big green cup and the Tigger cup. Which is bigger? And we got to talk about surface tension of water. We even floated a paper clip on the water. We made a mess, spilled lots of water (mostly inside the pan, but a little did manage to escape), and learned something. There was no cost to this project. Everything we used we had on hand.

Not bad for a sort of spur of the moment kid-directed science and math lesson!