Never boring: Fun in the Sun

But not without sunscreen!

After we've sealed up our classroom and pushed it to the side, in preparation for summer, it's important that the learning continue, even without our usual materials. Instead of independent work, we spend the last days before we say goodbye together in community.

When I asked the children to brainstorm about fun learning activities they'd like to do together the last days of school, one of the things on the list was science experiments. Of course, I love that!

A colleague was clearing out a cabinet in preparation for summer storage and came across a box of Solar UV beads. These beads are a perfect opportunity for an experiment designed to teach sun safety.

For this experiment, you will need:
* UV beads (I snuck outside and sorted the beads in the sunlight so that each group got 4 beads of a single color)
* pipe cleaners (4 for each group)
* 3 Q-tips for each group for applying the "mystery coatings"
* A set of 4 hole-punched index cards for each group, labeled Control, #1, #2, #3
* Mystery Coating 1
* Mystery Coating 2
* Mystery Coating 3

For the mystery coatings, I selected three white substances that were about the same creamy consistency and transferred samples into containers labeled 1, 2, and 3.

First, the children observe their beads in the classroom, where they look like plain white translucent pony beads.

Next, they take their bowl of four beads outside into the sunlight, where they change dramatically.

Next, the children take the beads into the shade and observe.

The children return to the classroom and observe as the beads return to their colorless status.

Now that we've done some experimenting with how the beads behave, we are ready to add the mystery coatings.

A pipe cleaner is pushed through each bead and then looped through the hole in one of the index cards. The bead on the card labeled "Control" is left without any coating. For each of the others, the mystery coating identified on the card's label is applied to the bead with a Q-tip. Remind the children to use a fresh Q-tip with each coating.