Bubbles!

Bubbles, bubbles everywhere! Today was filled with bubbles! Through our scientific play with bubbles we learned that adding soap to water weakens the pull of the surface tension and makes the surface of the water much stretchier. It spreads out enough for you to blow air inside-it's a bit like blowing up balloons. A bubble will burst when it's film gets so thin it can no longer contain the air inside. The colors we see depend on the thickness of the bubble's skin. Blue-green is the thickest, followed by blue(thinner), magenta(even thinner), and yellow-white(very thin). When the film appears black(or transparent), it is at it's very thinnest and is about to pop. You can guess the longevity of a bubble by observing its color. At that point, the bubble will be one millionth of an inch thick. We observed bubbles, measured bubbles, compared bubble solutions, made bubble blowers, and had lots of bubbly fun!!

Creativity

A large part of what we do has to do with being critical and creative thinkers. We focus on the characteristics of different types of critical and creative thinking: fluency, flexibility, elaboration, originality, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, risk taking, complexity, curiosity, and imagination. Today we focused on three of these characteristics: Flexibility results in many different kinds of ideas. The purpose of flexible thinking is to generate and promote responses that deviate from normal thought patterns. Elaboration is the creative thinking behavior that results in adding to or embellishing an idea. It is the ability to add details, fill in the gaps, build a group of related ideas and expand ideas. Originality is the creative thinking behavior that produces new or novel responses. Originality is often the by product of other creative thinking behavior. Most of all today we discussed how creativity can simply mean looking at the ordinary and seeing the extraordinary.