A little financial support

I was a room parent today for the girl's class party. It wasn't a Valentine's party, it was a "Caring and Sharing" party. I guess that's a PC version of Valentines? Although I'm not entirely sure what's wrong with Valentines in the first place. It's not like they didn't trade valentines, anyway.

The "regular" room parent (i.e. the one who actually does everything normally) brought in a chocolate fountain (how cool is that). They had rice crispy squares (yum), pound cake (yum), strawberries (yum), and pretzels (yum). And soft pretzel hearts (yum!) I said I'd handle the crafts and activities this time because she usually does everything, and I usually am just late.

I didn't want to have a normal room parent party, because you know me, I go overboard in everything. Bingo? Yeah, not for me. Cutting hearts out? Nope. Picture frames? Sorry. I'm a bit abnormal but wanted to something I thought was more fun.

First we made invisible ink and made secret notes. I tried the whole lemon juice thing beforehand but it didn't work out. You need a really really hot heat source - hair dryers, flashlights, and the like didn't work. I didn't want to bring in an iron and definitely not a candle. So, we made the invisible ink out of baking soda and water (equal parts). We wrote notes and rolled them up like scrolls, tied them with little rubber bands, and put them in a container to save for later (when they dried). The ink appears when you paint grape juice on it - the acid in the grape juice reacts with the baking soda base to turn colors. Unfortunately we never got back to the notes because we ran out of time. The class will do it next week.

We then made awesome little pipe cleaner animals to share. We made chameleons, mice, and penguins. We didn't get a chance to make the monkey (with banana) or teddy bears.
Also had a book with some of the other shapes. The group was a little too large, but they all were able to follow with help.
Pipe cleaners rock!

Then we played an awesome team-building activity that I found on PBS's web site. I always did love ZOOM! (0-2-1-3-4)
I gave each kid a plate, a cup, four straws, and a little clay. The object? Build a structure with all of the items. The plate is the only thing that can touch the table. The clay is the only thing that can touch the cup. The person (or team) that built the highest structure that held the most pennies would win. I didn't want to tell them they HAD to share, but I strongly implied that they should help each other and put their tools together. The tricky part was getting them to understand that they should try to make it high off the table AND hold a lot of pennies (rather than one or the other). But each table came up with different very cool solutions, and we all had fun! The "winning" structure was an engineering marvel, it held all the pennies I had (250 of them), and stood eight inches off the table.

The teacher said, "cool, physics!" More architecture and engineering, but glad she liked it!