Science Saturday: Fall Fun

I like to do various semi-education activities with my kids, most often on Saturdays. We call these Science Saturdays activities. I am going to post about some of the successful activities and the less-than-great semi-educational activities.

Free Fall Fun

I mostly have posted about various kits we use for science activities, but there are plenty of free/cheap DIY activities to do. I will collect some of the fall favorites here.

  • hiking
  • harvesting
  • pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins!
  • cookie decorating
  • leaf art
  • costumes
various fall fun

Pumpkins

There are tons of things to do with with pumpkins and they have been a favorite since the kiddos were babies. A short list of things we do.

  • painting pumpkins
  • picking pumpkins from farms, fall fests, etc
  • baking seasoned pumpkin seeds
  • carving pumpkins
pumpkin fun

Pumpkins are a simple and easy activity for easy fall fun, starting at a young age…

flying spiderman over pumpkins
painting with daddy
picking pumpkins
preparing pumpkins for carving
baby pumpkin painting
painting with mamma
teamwork clean out that pumpkin

Cookie Decorating

Fall is a good time for baking, cookies, gingerbread, and of course all the decorating that comes along with it.

cookies

Leaf Art

I remeber doing this as a kid myself and thought it made such pretty art. There are a number of leaf art projects. Erin helped the kids collect leaves and then ironed them between wax paper which creates a beautiful stain glass like leaf art.

Science Saturday: Colour Lab Mixer

I like to do various semi-education activities with my kids, most often on Saturdays. We call these Science Saturdays activities. I am going to post about some of the successful activities and the less-than-great semi-educational activities.

KidzLabs Colour Lab Mixer

The “colour” very British 😉 This KidzLabs Colour Lab Mixer is a simple kit that mostly lets the kids use easy-to-clean dyes to mix colors. The kit includes 18 projects, but some of them were above my kid’s attention span threshold. We also had the KiwiCo color chemistry set, which other than the Volcano activities didn’t drive as much variety as this kit.

The color lab kit

The kit comes with pretty simple materials but has had a good amount of activities, and honestly, young kids enjoy playing with color mixing, so it has gone pretty far. We have stored away the kit and re-used it for different activities or to repeat activities for over a year. Just giving them some tubs and colors and challenging them to make a new color like Orange (mix Yellow and Red) was fun for them.

The back shows some of the activities

A recent big hit has been “color fireworks,” which you can probably put together without anything in the kit… We ran out of the dye that comes with the kit long ago and just used food coloring or other kid-safe dyes. You find a jar and fill 90% with water 10% with oil, then put colors into the droppers to add “bubbles of color,” which explode when they sink through the oil and break through to the water.

Kid Approved? Yes

Again, you can do most of these activities without any kit, but the kit gets you started and gives you some good ideas. Then, you have some good bottles, tubes, droppers, and other reusable items.

Replayability: Good

At least from ages 2-6 this has solidly kept their interest each time it is out as we push towards the more complicated activities. So things weren’t hits (ice rainbow, dye flowers didn’t work out well)… Others were big hits, rainbow color mixer, fireworks in water, and watercolor on paper.

making primary colors for mixing