Jaynie the Scientist

On January 9th Jaynie was the scientist of the day at school. Each of the kids in her class get to preform a science experiment in front of the whole class. We have known about this since October and way back then Whit and her sat down and looked at some experiments and decided that she was going to make a clock run off a potato. They watched a kid do it on the Internet and it looked pretty easy so that was that. Now every once in while Jaynie would say, "Mom when are we going to get the stuff for my science experiment." And my reply would always be the same, "Don't worry honey you don't have to do it until after Christmas, we have time." Well when she went back to school after the break and came home and said, "Mom I have to do my experiment on Thursday," I started to panic a little bit. I put Whit in charge of getting the stuff, which was a little difficult to find and by Wednesday night we still couldn't make the experiment work. So while Whit went to the church that night Jaynie and I searched the Internet again and this time found an experiment that seemed much easier. So I loaded the girls into the car and we went to the store to get carbonated water and raisins to do the Dancing Raisins experiment. Well we got home and our raisins weren't dancing like we thought they should. Back to the computer (thank goodness for the Internet). Our next pick was the Floating Egg. We picked this one because we already had everything and it seemed like a no fail project. Finally at 8:30 we were able to make the egg float in a cup of salt water. I sent Jaynie off to bed and told her I would write something up for her to say and she could practice it in the morning. I felt like such a horrible parent. I have always been such a bad procrastinator, but now I am causing my daughter to be one too!! Well in the end she did a great job and the class loved her experiment. The only thing that would have made it better would have been more time because then her presentation would have been memorized instead of read. I have it on video, bit I took it with the video camera instead of our still and I have no idea how to download from the video camera. Sorry a still picture will have to be enough.

Oh and by the way, Whit did get the potato to light an itty, bitty light bulb when he got home after Jaynie was in bed. So I do have to give him credit for his persistence with the project. At least our kids got to enjoy that experiment. Here is a picture of the remains of the potato clock experiment. I think it was maybe a little too complicated for a first grader.