We’ve been spending a lot of time at the pool and the Allen family lake house which has led to many discussions about what sinks and what floats. It started coming up so often that we decided to do an experiment with the kids and it ended up being really fun! I was amazed at how often I was even wrong in my guess!

We started by making a little chart with the list of all the things we wanted to test. The kids ran around the yard and the house to find items they were curious about and I just wrote them down (they each had about five). Then the kids took turns holding up their object and we would all say if we thought it would float or sink. Sometimes I just wrote what the majority thought and other times I put what each kid thought because they really wanted to know who got it right (we are finding we have some competitive kids!).

Then we started dropping random crap in water!

Does anyone else only have naked Barbies in their house?

Barbie = FLOAT!

Gray was SO interested and excited about this project!

Do you see the steak knife? HA! Of course Gray came out with that and since it was for SCIENCE we let him drop it in! He was SO excited to see it drop so fast!

The Duplo was the best part! Gray was so excited that it floated but then it started filling with water and sinking… it started this really neat discussion about how boats float but if they fill with water they’ll sink.

He was SO sad that it started sinking! It was pretty funny!

Parker was most excited about her big block of wood she got in the garage! She thought for sure it would sink because it was heavy!

They were so funny trying to PUSH it down and sink it! I didn’t take any photos but we started to see how much we could pile on top of the wood and then talked about rafts and boats carrying people/things in the water.

Chris and I are NOT experts on ANY of this and I honestly have no idea which kind of science this even is! HA! I was NOT good at science in school! But what was neat is that even though we couldn’t give our kids exact answers we had fun trying! And I think it’s ok for us, as parents, to admit when we really don’t know some things. If we’d been really good and not headed out like we were, we should have gotten on the computer as a family and investigated even more. But if I’m honest, we are not that into education! HA! No, really we were just pressed for time and until now I haven’t thought about it again! Oh well, so’s life.

We really did have fun doing this though and I have a few more ideas for other simple experiments we can do as a family!