Blindfolded Children

I once went to an art gallery where one of the sculptures on exhibit was inside a sleeping bag.

You were encouraged to feel the sleeping bag to find out what the sculpture looked like.

You never got to see the sculpture.

Today’s children’s activity is something like that, where you ask your grandchildren to close their eyes, lead them through the house or outside and see if they can tell where they are without opening their eyes and notice things they may not when their eyes are open.

Materials:

1. Blindfolds
2. Paper and pencils (optional)
3. A safe place to walk around

Instructions:

1. Start in your kitchen.
2. If you have more than one grandchild participating, have them line up behind each other, close enough to keep a hand on each other’s backs.
3. Tell them you want them to remember everything they can about the walk they are about to go on.
4. Have the children put on blindfolds.
5. Tell them where to go by saying go straight, right or left.
6. Warn them if they are going to run into something on the left or right or in front of them.
7. Lead them around the house and then outside, making sure you tell them about steps.
8. At the end of the walk, after five or 10 minutes, ask them to tell you where they think they are.
9. Ask them why they think they are where they are.
10. Have them take off the blindfolds.
11. Ask them to write down or tell you 5 things each that they smelled, heard, and felt when they were walking.

Thanks to learner.org for this delightful activity.

Can you still walk around with your eyes closed and know where you are?

Are you sometimes struck by the sound of a strange bird?

Did you smell the daffodils when they bloomed this Spring?

To you and sharing the wonders of the world with your grandchildren.

Click here to order this blog on your Kindle for more fun activities with your grandchildren.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Click here to order my book, for affectionate, candid advice from mothers to grandmothers and grandmothers to mothers, “Who Gets to Name Grandmother? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers”

http://newgrandmas.com

Oceanic Plate and Continental Plate Make a Volcano

Where Do Mountains Come From?

This is another fun activity to do with your grandchildren. It is an easy way for your grandchildren to see how plate tectonics make mountains.

Materials:

• One sheet of newspaper
• Flat table

Instructions:

• Lay the sheet of newspaper, folded in quarters, flat on the table.
• Have your grandchild put one hand on either edge of the paper.
• Have them slowly push the edges toward the center.

What Should Happen?

The center of the newspaper should slowly rise from the table.

If it crumples instead of rising, either keep pushing the edges together for lower, more folded mountains, or  put a couple of fingers under the center of the paper to get it started moving up.

Why Is This Like Making a Mountain?

In this demonstration, the halves of the newspaper are acting like the tectonic plates that shift under the earth’s surface.

When they shift a little bit, we have earthquakes or tsunamis, like the one in Japan last March 11, 2011.

When they push against each other, they can make mountains or volcanoes. If they make a volcano, liquid rock, called molten lava, will spill out of the top.

One of the most recent examples of making a new volcano happened in central Mexico, in 1943, in a farmer’s field.

This volcano rose up in the middle of Mexico’s volcano belt.

It rose to be five stories high in a week. After a year, it was 1,102 feet high, ending at 1,391 feet in 1952, when it quit spewing lava.

Lava from the volcano covered two villages and ash covered almost ten square miles, or 6,200 acres.

Click here to read a villager’s description of that day.

Click here to read more about the volcano, Pericutin.

What Is the Difference Between a Mountain and A Volcano?

A mountain is made from the collision of two land masses, or continental tectonic plates.

A volcano is usually made from the collision of a continental plate and an oceanic plate, with the less dense oceanic plate sliding under and lifting the continental plate.

For a volcano to form, there must also be a crack in the plate that allows the lava to come through, while a mountain is just two land masses crumbling together, like the newspaper demonstration.

Volcanoes can become mountains when they go dormant and stop releasing lava.

Click here to read more about the differences between a mountain and a volcano.

Thanks to Bill Nye, the Science Guy for suggesting this activity.

Do you remember reading stories in Weekly Reader about the volcano in the farmer’s cornfield?

Have you ever visited a volcano?

What is the highest mountain you’ve been on?

To you and exploring the wonders of nature with your grandchildren.

Click here to order this blog for your Kindle and read about more fun things to do with your grandchildren.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Click here to order my book, an affectionate, candid advice book about parenting and grandparenting, “Who Gets to Name Grandma?”

http://newgrandmas.com

Related posts

• What causes earthquakes?

Related articles

• Volcanoes (usgs.gov)

• Plate tectonics modelled realistically (physorg.com)

This activity helps children relate patterns and shapes on flat paper to the real world.

Sugar Cube

Assemble:

• Sugar cubes
• Grid paper (sometimes called graph paper)
• Pencil
• Colored markers or crayons (optional)
• Colored sugar, sprinkles or food coloring and q-tips (optional)

For the first activity, have each grandchild build a structure out of 6 sugar cubes placed next to or on top of each other.

Color in the squares on the grid paper that represent the front, top and side views of the structure.

Label each view, top, side or front.

For the next activity, draw a front, top or side view on the grid paper, then try to construct the structure you see.

For another activity, cut out a pattern of six flat cubes, make it identical to your sugar cube structure, then flatten it out to see what it looks like.

Click here to print out a flat cube drawing to cut out to start with.

Cut it out.

Fold it into a structure that is the same as the sugar cube structure.

What would a flattened pattern look like if there were four or five cubes instead of six?

Optional:

1. Color the sides of the sugar cubes by dabbing food coloring on each side with q-tips or wetting the sugar cube with water and dusting it with colored sugar or sprinkles.
2. Color squares in the grid with crayons or markers and rebuild the structure to match the colors on the grid.
3. Color squares on one side of the flat cube cut-out. Re-fold it. Rebuild the sugar cube structure to match the colors on the outside of the cube cut-out.

Don’t tell your grandchildren they are learning spatial perception skills that will help them in ways that range from reading the blueprints that architects design and draw for building buildings to putting machines back together from diagrams to assembling a bike from written instructions.

Do decide in advance whether you are going to let them eat the sugar cubes.

Thanks to learner.org for this activity. Click here to see the original instructions.

To you and the fun you have with your grandchildren.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Click here to order our book, “Who Gets to Name Grandma?”

Click here to order our blog on Kindle

http://newgrandmas.com

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• Massive sugarcube architectural sculptures (boingboing.net)

Georges Seurat

This activity requires adult supervision, because you use candles to melt crayons.

You are going to make a pointillist crayon art picture.

Although the craftster who made this originally used white tiles as backing, and then they were so beautiful she put them on her mantelpiece as decorations, you could as easily use white posterboard for the backing.

You will need:

• Leftover crayons (it is particularly striking if you use variations of a single color, like light and dark reds and pinks)
• White posterboard or white tile
• Paper to make large letters
• Pencil
• Candle
• Matches

Instructions:

1. Cut the posterboard to the size you want to use. 8 ½ x 11 inches, the size of a standard piece of typing paper, or a square 8×8 both work fine.
2. Make a letter outline almost as large as the posterboard you’ve cut out. You might pick the first letter of your grandchild’s name, for example. You can print a very large letter on printer paper from your computer, trace around a letter from a magazine, or draw one. It should have a simple outline, what printers call a sans serif font, no little edges extending out from the letter, so it will be easier to trace around. The original craftster used Arial font. You could also use a simple shape, like a heart.
3. Put the paper letter down on the posterboard or tile and trace around it with a pencil.
4. Select the colors of crayon you want to use and set them aside from the others.
5. Melt the tip of one of the crayons you want to use and let it drip on the posterboard outside the outlines of the letter you’ve drawn.
6. Drip melted crayon dots evenly around the posterboard, staying outside the lines of the letter outline.
7. When you have used up that crayon, select another, similar color. Melt and drip dots evenly over the posterboard, as with the first crayon.
8. Continue dripping crayon dots over the board, being careful not to drip them in the letter, but letting them overlap dots already on the board.
9. Continue dripping dots of crayon over the board until the letter clearly stands out and you are happy with the results.

Hang or prop the letter board somewhere prominently, such as in your grandchild’s room or in the kitchen.

Thanks to Nina, at www.grandmaideas.com for suggesting this activity.

Thanks also to Polly,  for designing it and giving us a step-by-step photo tutorial.

Polly altered an idea she saw in which the letters were outlined with sprinkles, instead of melted crayon dots.

This Looks A Lot Like Some Paintings

If your grandchild is interested in dotted paintings like this, you might show them some from pointillists, like Georges Seurat, the creator of this style,  Vincent van Gogh, who sometimes used this style, or more recently, Chuck Close, known for his pixelated portraits.

On Frugal Fridays, we write about fun things to do with your grandchildren with materials you have around the house.

Click here to order this blog for your Kindle.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Click here to order  “Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers”

http://newgrandmas.com

Related articles

• Melty Crayon Art (collegecraft.wordpress.com)
• My Take On Melted Crayon Art:) (cutoutandkeep.net)
• How To: Melted Crayon Art (craftzine.com)
• Old Crayons Find New Life (pittsburgh.cbslocal.com)
• Day 2: crayon hearts (thingaday2012.wordpress.com)

I took out a pack of cards from my Mom’s end table. I got the end table when she came to live with us in 2001.

Family toes (Photo credit: dospaz)

She and Dad were great Bridge players, so we always had decks of cards around. Bridge was the most common reason they got together with friends.

I also inherited the card tables and square tablecloths that go with them and still routinely find Bridge score cards in random places.

One two-deck set of cards, still in its Bridge box, was wrapped in plastic wrap. I couldn’t bring myself to open it.

Then, there was the deck marked PAN AM. Do you remember when airlines gave out decks of cards so you’d have something to do on a long flight?

What Do You Need?

For this activity, you will need:

• A deck of cards
• A pair of socks

Instructions: Part I

1. Take off your shoes and socks.
2. Wear shorts or roll up your pants legs.
3. Start building a house of cards. If you don’t know or don’t remember how, several instructional videos are provided below. Spend 5 minutes building.
4. Put your socks back on.
5. Close your eyes.
6. Point to your toes.

You should be able to do this without any trouble. Just open your eyes while you are still pointing to your toes and see how close you got.

Instructions: Part II

1. Leave your socks on
2. Start building a house of cards again. Spend 5 minutes building.
3. Close your eyes.
4. Point to your toes.

This time, it is likely you missed your toes. Maybe by a little. Maybe by a lot. But, nothing like the ease with which you found your toes the first time.

What Is Going On?

The term to describe this phenomenon is habituation.

The first time you put your socks on, you were really paying attention, so you remembered where your toes were.

The second time, your brain was used to having your socks on your feet and paid less attention to where your toes were.

Habituation is a lowered response to the same stimulation over time.

An example of why this is useful in real-life might be someone’s response to living near a firestation.

The first few times they hear the alarm calling out the fire trucks, they startle easily. But, over time, they begin not to respond to it at all, until they don’t even notice it.

Even infants get habituated. If you leave something in the same place, eventually, they won’t look at it as long, even if you move the baby around the room.

If you move the object, however, they will start looking at it again.

This phenomenon is why I like to move pictures on my walls.

Eventually, if left in the same place, they become like wallpaper. If I move them to different rooms, it is like having new pictures again.

YouTube Videos on How to Build a House of Cards

Did you ever build houses of cards when you were growing up?

Did you make them with squares, triangles or pyramids?

Were you able to keep your brothers or sisters from knocking them down?

Click here for a Youtube video on how to build a house of cards with squares.

Click here for a Youtube video on how to build a house of cards with pyramids.

Click here for a Youtube video on how to build a house of cards with triangles. Notice that the instructor is using cards that have rough edges.

Click here for a Youtube video on how to build a house of cards with pyramids and several layers. Notice the licking of the edges of the cards.

Thanks to Bill Nye, the Science Guy, for this activity, under Humans/Don’t Be Nervous.

What do you do to change your environment to keep it fresh?

What advantages do you see for habituation in real life?

Does habituation apply to learning new skills, like driving?

To you and explaining the world to your grandchildren.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Author, Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers

http://newgrandmas.com

Related articles

• Why Doesn’t a Golf Ball Fall Faster Than a Tennis Ball? Frugal Friday. (newgrandmas.com)
• Can You Blow Out a Candle with a Funnel? Frugal Friday. (newgrandmas.com)

Golf Ball

A golf ball is heavier than a tennis ball.

But, a tennis ball is bigger than a golf ball.

Which do you think would hit the ground sooner if you dropped them both at the same time?

You Will Need:

• A metal cookie tray
• A tennis ball
• A golf ball
• A feather (optional, but fun)
• A chair or stepladder to stand on

The Experiment

First, estimate which you think will hit the ground first. The metal cookie tray will help amplify the sound to tell you.

Then, decide why you think your decision is what will happen.

Is it the relative size of the balls? The relative weight of the balls?

Is there some other factor at work, like gravity or magnetism, the tides, the season, the time of day?

Finally, conduct the experiment to test your theory.

• Turn the cookie tray upside down on the floor next to the chair or stepladder.
• Stand on the chair and hold the golf ball and the tennis ball at the same height.
• Drop the balls at the same time.

Which one hits the tray first?

Do you hear one sound (bang) or two sounds (bang-bang)?

What Will Happen?

This is a trick. They both hit the ground at the same time. You will hear one bang.

Why?

Because gravity is a stronger force than the relative weight or size of the balls and it pulls them both with the same force.

Galileo published his theory that all objects with different weights would fall at the same speed in a vacuum in 1638.

Though his biographer claimed trhat Galileo tested this theory by dropping objects from the top of the Tower of Pisa, Galileo never wrote that he performed such an experiment.

Feathers Are Light. What Happens With Them?

What about if you drop a feather and golf ball at the same time?

The feather falls slower than the golf ball.

Why? Doesn’t gravity work on feathers too?

Yes, but the feather has so many air pockets in it that the air slows it down.

Astronaut David Scott tested this on the moon during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971.

With no air, gravity was the same for both the hammer and the feather and they hit the ground at the same time.

Click here to watch a video of Astronaut Scott performing this experiment.

Thanks to Bill Nye, the Science Guy for this activity.

Did you ever imagine you would have to go to the top of the Tower of Pisa to test Galileo’s theory?

Did your grandchildren figure out what was going to happen?

Did they want to test other objects, like a baseball ball and a pingpong ball?

To you and the delight of discovering the world through your grandchildren’s eyes.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Author, Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers

http://newgrandmas.com

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Can you do what the government does and coat a metal with copper?

Pennies

Yes. Kind of.

The Materials You’ll Need

¼ cup of white vinegar

1/8 teaspoon of salt

Clean, empty glass jar

Twenty copper pennies

Iron nail

Baking soda

Sponge

1. Combine the vinegar and salt in the jar. Stir well.
2. Add the pennies to the salt-vinegar solution in the jar. Wait three minutes.
3. Clean the iron nail with the sponge, using a mixture of baking soda and water.
4. Rinse the nail. Put it in the jar with the salt-vinegar solution and pennies. Be sure the vinegar covers the nail.
5. Wait at least 15 minutes.

What Should Happen?

After 15 minutes, you should see a copperish tint on the nail.

Note: the nail needs to be iron, not coated and not galvanized. I had to look through several types of nails to find one.

I tried the experiment with all of them, and threw in a magnet and the end of a wire coat hanger I’d stripped the plastic coating off with pliers.

Only the uncoated nail worked.

I left the nail in the salt-vinegar penny solution all night.

This is when you see a more pronounced effect.

The nail glints like copper and is clearly coated with copper from the pennies.

This does not hurt the pennies. It just makes them shiny.

Why Does This Happen?

The acid of the vinegar combines with the copper on the pennies to form a copper acid that sticks to the iron nail.

This process only uses acid.

Electricity can be added to the process, for electroplating, the common method for covering one metal with another.

Thank you to wackyuses.com for this activity.

Click here for more experiments with electroplating, including covering a brass key with the copper from pennies.

Is This How the U.S. Mint Makes Pennies?

Although I could not find out how the U.S. Mint binds copper to a zinc interior, whether it is cladding, which is simply the term for covering a material with another or electroplating, I did find an animated explanation of how coins are made.

Click here for the U.S. Mint’s description of how a coin is made.

Since 1982, U.S. pennies have been made from zinc and coated with 2 ½ percent copper. Before 1982, a penny was 95 percent copper.

In 2004, the U.S. Mint said it cost 9/10 of a cent to make a penny.

With the rising cost of zinc and copper, by 2010 that number is up to 1 4/5 cents to make a penny. This has sparked a debate about whether the government should continue to make them.

Should prices be rounded up to the nearest nickel? A nickel also costs more to make than it is worth.

Because of the increasing cost of copper, the U.S. government has been looking at using other metals since the 1970s.

They tried to make pennies with aluminum, but pediatricians said they would be too hard to spot on an x-ray, so the effort was abandoned.

Did You Know?

The head of a penny is heavier than the tail side.

That is, the side with Lincoln’s profile, which has been on the penny since 1909, is slightly heavier than the reverse side.

While wacky uses says this is why a penny falls heads down, tail up 49.5 percent of the time, I would expect the heavier Lincoln to fall heads down more than half the time.

Ivars Peterson, author of the blog, Mathematical Tourist, tells us if you spin it on its edge, a penny is more likely to land heads up, also because of unequal weight distribution, but why would the heavier side land up?

Have you ever tried to lift copper off a penny?

Have you ever left a penny on the railroad tracks?

Have you ever used the vending machine that smashes a penny?

To you and sharing the wonders of the world with your grandchildren.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Author, Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers

http://newgrandmas.com

Thank you to the hundreds of readers who nominated this as the best grandparenting blog. We did not make it into the top five, but would like to ask readers to vote for our next favorite grandparenting blog, Grandmas’ Briefs.

Click here to vote for Grandmas’ Briefs for Best Grandparenting Blog at grandparents.about.com

Related posts

• Whatever happened to the Sacajawea $1 coin?

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• Chemistry Fun with Pennies chemistry.about.com
• Penny Bias mathematicaltourist.blogspot.com
• Electroplating exo.net

What Happens When You Blow a Ping Pong Ball Through a Funnel?

Ping Pong Balls

With simple materials around the house, you can help your grandchildren understand why airplanes fly.

How Is a Ping Pong Ball Different From a Flame?

We discovered in an earlier post, Can You Blow Out a Candle with a Funnel, that you can blow out a candle with a funnel, depending on which way the funnel is pointed.

That is, you can use the narrow end of the funnel to concentrate your breath and blow out a candle if you blow through the larger end, but not the other way around.

How about if you blow through the funnel and try to blow a ping pong ball up in the air?

The Experiment

You will need:

• A funnel
• A ping pong ball

Make sure the narrow end of the funnel is clean, because you will be blowing on it.

First, think about what you expect to happen.

Will you be able to keep the ping pong ball in the air by blowing through the funnel?

• Put the ping pong ball into the wider end of the funnel
• Keep the funnel upright so the ping pong ball will not fall out
• Blow through the narrow end of the funnel.

What Happened?

You could not blow the ping pong ball into the air.

In fact, it seemed to hug the inside of the funnel.

Why?

It’s Bernoulli’s principle at work again. This is the same force that helps airplanes fly.

Just as the wind goes across the top of a curved wing of an airplane, making the pressure on the wing lower on top than underneath, helping to propel the plane upwards, the curved surface of the ping pong ball reduces the pressure around the sides of the ball and increases it on the top, the other side of where you were blowing.

This increased pressure on the top of the ball forces it back down into the funnel.

Not what you expected, huh?

What Else Can We Do with A Ping Pong Ball?

In an earlier post, When Is a Piece of Paper Like an Airplane Wing, when we talked about airplane wings and demonstrated Bernoulli’s principle with a piece of paper, we also described how you could float a ping pong ball with a hair dryer.

Let’s start with that, and add some more ideas. This experiment requires adult supervision because you will be using a knife.

You Will Need:

• 4 or 5 ping pong balls
• A hair dryer
• An empty, round, cardboard salt container
• A toilet paper tube

Here’s What You Do:

• Turn the hair dryer on maximum power, cool setting
• Turn the hair dryer so the air is blowing up
• Hold a ping pong ball in the air blowing up
• Let go of the ball.

What Happens?

The ping pong ball will float. Bernoulli’s principle is at work again. The flowing air around the curved ball allows you to keep the ball in the air without touching it.

Next, cut off both ends of the salt container. The cardboard is stiff, so this requires adult supervision.

Now, float the ping pong ball in the air over the hair dryer and carefully slip the cylindrical salt container over the floating ball.

It will float just above the top of the cardboard container.

Any Other Tricks?

Now, float the ping pong ball in the air over the hair dryer and carefully slip the cardboard toilet paper tube over the ball.

The ball will shoot through the air like a rocket!

Now, try to float two balls in the air over the hair dryer. Three? Four?

I never got past two, but even this was fun as they kept dancing around each other in the air.

Thanks to the California Science Center for these activities and explanation of Bernoulli’s principle.

What would happen with a paper towel tube?

What would happen with a funnel big enough for the ping pong ball to fit through the small end?

What would happen with a square box instead of a cylinder?

To you and sharing the wonder of the universe with your grandchildren.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Author, Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers

Click here to nominate my book for Best Grandparenting Book at grandparents.about.com

http://newgrandmas.com

Click here to nominate this blog for Best Grandparenting Blog at grandparents.about.com

Related posts

• Can You Blow Out a Candle with a Funnel?
• When Is a Piece of Paper Like an Airplane Wing?

Candle

This one requires adult supervision, because it involves fire.

You may have read my earlier post about how I almost burned down my house when I was five after asking my Mom to light a candle for me, since I was too young to be allowed to do it myself.

This activity requires:

• A large funnel
• A candle
• Matches
• A ruler

Ask your grandchildren what they think will happen if they try to blow out the candle by blowing through the funnel.

The funnel will be in two different directions – once with the wide end toward the candle, once with the narrow end near the candle. What do they think will happen in each case?

The Experiment

1. Have your grandchildren measure eight inches from a candle.
2. Light the candle.
3. Ask them to blow through the narrow end of the funnel that is eight inches away from the candle.
4. Ask them to blow through the wide end of the funnel that is eight inches from the candle.

What happens?

Which time are they able to blow out the candle?

The Answer and the Reason

They should easily be able to blow out the candle when they have the narrow end of the funnel closer to the candle, blowing through the wide end of the funnel.

They should not easily be able to blow out the candle if they have the wide end of the funnel closest to the candle, but still eight inches away.

When you are blowing through the small end, your breath spreads out before it gets to the candle. This means not enough air is focused on the flame to blow it out.

When you are blowing through the wide end, your breath is focused narrowly at the candle.

Why Doesn’t a Megaphone Work This Way?

It’s the opposite of what happens when you yell through a megaphone. A megaphone is shaped like a funnel but has the opposite effect as blowing out a candle.

When you are talking, the sound of your voice is spread out all around you. When you use a megaphone, the sound of your voice is concentrated in the direction the megaphone is pointed.

Click here to learn more from Bill Nye, the Science Guy, who suggested this candle and funnel activity.

Click here to learn more from ehow.com about how megaphones work.

At what age were you allowed to light matches by yourself?

Does your family have a rule about when children are allowed to play with matches?

To you and exploring the wondrous world around us with your grandchildren.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Click here to order my book, “Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers”

Click here to nominate my book for Best Grandparenting Book at grandparents.about.com

http://newgrandma.com

Click here to  nominate this blog for Best Grandparenting Blog at grandparents.about.com

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On average, an adult has 1.3 gallons of blood. You can calculate your own since it’s about 8% of your weight.

Diagram of the Human Heart

Women have about about 10 pints and men have about 12 pints of blood (8 pints to a gallon).

When you donate blood, you give one pint at a time. You can donate as often as every two months.

Did Your Parents Used to Donate Blood?

My father told us the story once about when he donated blood in the Army.

The nurse was not very skilled at finding a vein to start drawing blood.

After she had poked him several times, without success, he looked her in the eye and said, “You have one more chance.”

She looked at his pale face, saw that he was about to faint, laid him down and had another nurse draw the blood later.

How Does Blood Move Around In the Body?

Your grandchildren might be interested in how blood moves around inside. Or, maybe they’ve never thought about it, since it just happens automatically.

Here’s a way to get them started thinking about the importance of the heart in pumping blood to all parts of your body.

A Simple Experiment

Have each grandchild, and you do it too, raise one hand straight up in the air and keep the other hand straight down at their sides.

Have them count slowly to 60.

At the end of the count, they can bring their hands down and compare the color.

The one that was in the air should be much lighter than the one that was straight down.

Why?

The Heart As Blood Pump

Gravity helps pull our blood down from our head to our feet.

The rest of the work of circulating our blood falls to the heart, which is pumping it out to our hands and feet and everywhere gravity isn’t taking care of it.

When you disrupt gravity by holding your hand in the air and all you have left is your heart pumping, you can see how important gravity is.

William Harvey, an English physician, was the first to write a comprehensive description of how the heart and circulatory system works in 1628.

Thanks to Bill Nye, The Science Guy, for suggesting this activity.

Have you ever given blood?

Did you ever faint after giving blood?

Do your grandchildren know that you can give blood?

To you and sharing the world with your grandchildren.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru

Click here to order my book, “Who Gets to Name Grandma? The Wisdom of Mothers and Grandmothers.”

http://newgrandmas.com

P.S. Click here to order this blog on your Kindle.