Lillian Feldman-Hill, KID Museum Educator & Experimentation Station Instructor:
For me, science has always brought a sense of wonder–and the more I learn, the more it increases. Sharing that wonder with kids, while teaching them real-world applications, is the best of two worlds: education and entertainment.
Every day we witness “miracles” of chemistry, biology, nature, physics, and psychology without even realizing it. KID Museum’s Experimentation Station was developed to show kids the laws of science at work, so they can better understand them. Each week, our participants get the chance to interact with amazing, explosive, colorful, real science that taps into their natural curiosity.
Science often looks like magic with one important difference: science answers how and why. The magic is even better when you know how the trick is done! A fan favorite was SLIME day, where we made three different kinds of slime and fun sensory materials to touch while learning about polymers, the special properties of non-Newtonian fluids (it acts like a solid and a liquid), and the fun of sodium polyacrylate (super-absorbent indoor snow). We also loved Food Science Day, where we made ice cream and everyone figured out that salt was the secret ingredient. On Senses Day we fooled our brains and learned wacky ways to trick our five senses.
Every child may understand the why differently, but experiencing the results of their experiments is consistently fun and always educational.