Tuesday, May 5, 2009

a cool birthday present....

Yesterday Alex decided to get back out the science kit he had gotten as a birthday present...
We had already played with the glass prism and hung up our prism chain in the window. But yesterday they wanted to play with the UV activated beads. The beads start out a frosted white color (or a very, very pale pastel color) and then turn bright colors in sunlight.

They started out by setting them up on our window sill (please, please ignore my dirty windows)...
then they sorted them by color once they changed color...
The kit came with a square of clear plastic. They then put a small sample of sunscreen on the square and put it over a set of beads that had not be exposed to the sun to see if they would change color. They washed off the sunscreen and tried again with different SPF's. It was a pretty cool exercise for them. Of course the SPF 50 we had worked the best :-)

1 comment:

Alycia in Va. said...

looks like fun. I use to have a crystal changing necklace as a young girl...neat.