We made a light table!

On Christmas Eve of this year we went to our city's shiny new science centre. Monster and his dad spent a ton of time playing at the light tables, almost as much time as they spent playing with the big (and super cool) water features. I wanted to recreate the same type of play at home but WOW are light panels expensive. Buying one would be practical for a school, I imagine, but for the three of us to play with? Not so much. So instead I set about googling and figured out how to make one ourselves.

Teachpreschool.org had a pretty great tutorial for making their own basic light table, so we started there. Unfortunately I didn't think to take pictures of the process of making our own table but the steps are pretty basic - the most labour intensive part of the whole process was going to the store to buy a light.

1. Find a big plastic bin - we stole one from my mom's craft room (good thing she likes us?). The bin should be a decent size, I think ours is 12x22 and as shallow as possible, no more than a couple of inches. If you can get one with a frosted bottom awesome, if not you'll need to paint the bottom. The most important part is that the bottom is flat.
2. Put a piece of newspaper inside of the bin and tape it down so that only the sides are exposed. Spray paint the sides with white paint - make sure you do the inside, so little fingers can't peel the paint off. 
3. Put lights inside - I used a 24 inch tube fluorescent type, designed to be an under-counter light in a kitchen. It fit perfectly diagonally in the lid to give good, even lighting. The cord is pretty thick but on the right angle the bin still snaps into the lid to keep the light table sturdy.
4. Play! I ordered some cool window blocks but they haven't showed up yet so we stole some coloured transparency paper from my mom (the theme of today's post is larceny) and cut out shapes to play with.

The simplest thing...

I love looking at big, elaborate science experiments online. I get big ideas about the great things Monster and I could do, the cute lab coat he'll wear and the things he'll learn. The problem, of course, is that Monster is not quite two. He isn't ready to sit down and make a hypothesis and explore ninety-three possible outcomes. He wants to see something cool, he wants to figure it out, and he wants to be able to do so independently because he is a "big boy" and no one better forget it. The most basic science experiment that I could think of (that is also 100% safe for him to do independently) was playing with baking soda and vinegar.

Getting started.

Plain baking soda and vinegar is fun but Monster sees me use it to clean and clear drains on a pretty regular basis so I didn't think it would be too exciting for him. To make it a bit more exciting I added a few drops of food colouring (neon food colouring!) to plastic containers full of baking soda and then we got to work. We started off using the turkey baster to add vinegar but it was too big for Monster to use comfortably. Plastic pipettes or eyedroppers are officially on my shopping list.

Once Monster got the hang of adding the vinegar he was on a roll - every container was fizzing and bubbling over. The best part was how many times he could get a container to re-fizz (there's no way that's a real word) just by adding some vinegar or poking/stirring/smushing his hands into the bowls. Eventually he had the soupy dark purple vinegar up to the edges of the casserole dish his project was contained in. I dumped it out and added a bit of fresh baking soda twice before he had enough of this project. 

We'll definitely be doing this again, Monster had way too much fun not to.