Geo board and popcorn experiments

I will be doing lots of kid stuff this week with both children home for school holidays.  We spent all morning making and playing with a geoboard (I got the idea from these wonderful people).  I have been meaning to do this for awhile so we went and dug an old piece of chipboard out of the crawlspace (we have access from the basement) to use.  I divided the board up into three spaces with a Sharpie and then the kids drew their own dot patterns while I did a grid in the middle.  I didn't have enough nails so not all the dots got covered.  I have to say, don't use chipboard for this!  It was too hard for the kids to do any of the hammering and that was going to be part of the activity.  I would look for some old pine next time so the kids could hammer as well.  The kids really had a ball playing with this for ages.

The other thing we did this morning was popcorn experiments.  I figured that if the popcorn pops in a paper bag why wouldn't it pop in a covered bowl?  Well, I will have to look into the science behind it now as it didn't pop very well at all.  Then we tried a covered plate.  Then a plate with no cover.  You can see our dismal results.  I did get more popped corn than this photo shows but the kids had already retrieved most of it.  They really enjoyed watching it pop and ping all over the microwave though!  I haven't given up on my experimenting in this arena though.  Can oven bags go in the microwave?  I will have to check...