Chinese New Year ... Almost...

We missed doing anything on CNY as we had other things planned, so took the opportunity at our weekly group to do some activities instead.

I had pre printed everyone's names in Chinese so we could look at how differently the letters are formed - they had fun trying to work out whose name was whose.

We also made some samurai warrior hats - making them as scary as possible to frighten our opponents..!

We also played a very fun game using chopsticks... Everyone had a plate of mint imperials, raisins and marshmallows - the rule was; if you could pick it up with the chopsticks, you could eat it.  I was amazed at how well they all did with this... Embarrassingly much better than I was..!

No Chinese New Year is complete without a dragon... we played 'catch the tail'; everyone lined up and held onto the person ion front... then the 'head' had to try and catch the tail... Yup, you guessed it ... ended up with everyone in a heap on the floor...

Eggs...!

By far my most favourite Tuesday group session so far... Today we looked at eggs...

We talked about how strong eggs are, and to demonstrate everyone had a go at trying to break an egg by squeezing it.  Then I got one of them to stand on an egg - guess what, it broke :) 

Now how about if I try and stand on twelve eggs..? 

Try to ignore the pink socks (it's a long story) but imagine the looks on their faces to see that none of the eggs broke ... I'll confess to some surprise myself.  Of course everyone wanted a go and they took turns in standing on eggs :)

We also looked at a transparent egg... Eggs that have been soaked in vinegar lose their shells and they end up looking quite cool.. I did two : one hard boiled and raw.

This the eggs in the vinegar.

Not only do they look cool, but the hard boiled version also bounces..! A bouncy egg...! 

We discovered that the raw egg also bounced a little... But not very well and quickly broke.

We looked at how to make an egg float, with the aid of a little salt.

And because up until now all the experiments had worked too well, we had to have one fail :) 

The classic suck a hard boiled egg into a bottle... Inspite of our best efforts this one just would not work - and we tried a lot...! One to revisit once I've figured out the problem I think...! 

So what can you do with a load of eggs once you finished experimenting...? Well, you can see what happens when you drop one :) 

Sometimes it's not about the science, but about having a go at things you normally can't do...