Growing Colonies Of The Fuzzy Kind

I thought it would be fun to share just what we're growing in the kitchen this week :) No it's not vegetable seedlings or easter grass.... think a little more creepy *grin*. We're raising our own colony of bacteria :)

We started with three petri dishes and to try and keep it as scientific as possible I got my oldest to boil and sterilize all of the dishes before we started so that we could keep as much extra bacteria out of the equation as possible.

As soon as our petri dishes were ready to go we filled them with agar or in our case gelatin since I didn't have actual agar :) We brought one cup of water to a boil, stirred in one teaspoon of sugar, one package of knox gelatin and a few drops of orange food coloring and simmered the whole thing for 30 minutes. Once the 30 minutes were up we portioned out the gelatin equally into each of the three petri dishes and waited for it to cool and set.

The next step was to decide just what we wanted to swab and transfer into our dishes. K had such a hard time picking since we could only use two dishes and he wanted to try so many different things :) So he settled for the kitchen sink and the telephone with our third dish as the control.

At each place he took a clean q-tip and swabbed it all over their surfaces and then he took it to one of the petri dishes and gently rubbed it over one quarter of the gelatin then turned the dish 90 degrees and rubbed it again over the quarter section making sure that he pulled some of his strokes through the edge of section he swabbed last until the entire dish was covered :)

With each one carefully labeled...

it was time to wait and see just what would happen!

We're five days into our experiment and things are growing and remember all that sterilizing we did in the beginning so that we would have a super clean control petri dish? Well that baby is growing some funky fuzz of its own! LOL.

If you grow some colonies of your own let me know. I know my son would love to see what grows in your petri dishes *grin*.

Hugs,
Rosina

PS. Looking for more crafty ideas or inspiration? Pop over to Natural Suburbia's Creative Friday and see what others are up to :)

Tinting Flower Petals

We're finally moving out of our winter hibernation mode and getting involved in some of the homeschool activities that are happening around us :) Usually during winter I hesitate to sign up for any outings since we live in the sticks *grin* nearly an hours drive away from the nearest city and the roads are completely unpredictable to navigate but with the complete absence of any snow this year we're ready to get out and about!

One of the nearby museums is running a program geared specifically for homeschool kids and L is finally old enough at 6 to participate so she's completely thrilled :) Today they learned all about plants and their parts by drawing and labeling a flower, explored what was growing at a nearby park and then coming back to the museum and planting different seeds that they had found at the park.

It's so cute! She has two little paper cups filled with dirt and in one is what looks like a maple tree seed pod and in the other is a mystery seed which her teacher thinks is a zinnia :) I sure hope that something sprouts up for her! *grin*.

They're second little activity was learning about how flowers drink through their capillary action so they filled little ziploc baggies with brightly colored water and then placed a zinnia inside. Now we wait and watch the flower drink up the dyed water and see the tips of the flower petals change colors as they take in the dye :)

Thankfully the little baggies made it home without upsetting in the car! Although we did have a minor spill at home on the windowsill when green food coloring dripped all down my nice white wall. ACK! Luckily I spotted it right away before it dried on and stained. Needless to say our flowers are safely in glass jars now *grin*.

Can't wait to see what project they do next time :)

~ Rosina