S
cience Club happened because I was put on the
spot. You could say I’m more dreamer than doer.
I definitely work better when I have a deadline.
But when Donna, a new neighbour, a doer
not
a dreamer, came up with the light bulb plan of a weekly
science club for our kindergarten girls, I felt I had to say
yes. I’d long suspected I’d been putting work before fun
and for sure I’d been a neglectful play date-arranger.
My daughter and I are both homebodies in danger of
hunkering down on the couch and never leaving it. I said
yes, thinking a science club would probably never happen.
But then, the next Tuesday, it happened. The
neighbour in question began with a bang. Literally. We
found ourselves out in our estate’s grounds, three pink-
dressed girls in tow, dodging security cameras and ping
pong balls erupting from plastic bottles. (The science bit?
Gasses versus force.)
The girls giggled, then screamed in delight, then
gathered on the ground to launch their own concoctions.
And, I think, in that moment, they were hooked.
In the beginning
It felt weird, initially, to gather each week at one or another
of our houses with a purpose. My daughter is the type to
wrinkle her nose if I suggest a favourite dress-up game for
her while her friends are around. She likes to be in control.
No prompting. So to commandeer her, and two other girls
who were only just becoming friends, felt a little alien. I
didn’t know how to play the teacher role. Plus, they were
wee girls, aged three and four. What did they need to know
about science?
At first, we took tentative steps. Our experiments
centred on what we thought would please three very girlie
girls. One of the first was a tried and tested faithful: “magic”
coloured swirling milk. This is where you add food colouring
to a saucer of milk, and then touch it with a detergent-loaded
cotton wool stick, which causes a reaction that makes the
colours swirl together. I had a vague recollection of doing
this at some after-school club, maybe Brownies, when I was
young. We upped the ante, placing paper on the milk surface
to make prints of the swirls. The girls loved it.
Getting involved in a mum-and-daughter science
club proved a re-education for
Elle Kwan.
science
bit
...
Here
comes
the
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October 2014
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