Are You Raising a Future Scientist? Use Your Backyard Cubby House for Experiments!

More and more kids these days are getting into science and staying interested through the high school years. Which is awesome! This means there will be more people working in fields of study that will push our society forward in technology, research on healthy living and so much more. And it means your kids now have another activity to do in their cubby house or fort.

So, how do kids get interested in scientific studies? Mostly, it’s their teachers that will interested them by using a fun and exciting experiment. Because science, you see is hands on and kids LOVE learning when it’s hands on! We all do, right? Then kids bring home this awe and fascination of science to you. Here is where you could drop the ball and make the teacher look cooler – or you could become the coolest parent on the planet and get some science experiments ready for your child to do in their backyard cubby house or fort. The cubby house and forts make this activity a breeze as you don’t have to have a science mess in the house, the kids will feel more ownership of the experiment since it is in their cubby and cubby houses and forts were made for this kind of fun.

I know some parents are out there wondering why science is important for kids? What benefits do kids get out of putting Mentos in Coke and watching it explode? Couldn’t they just watch that on television and get the same thing out of it? Well, no. Because when you watch something on television, you do not get the full effect of the experiment. You need to see the bubbles explode though the top, hear the ‘wooossshhh’ sound and run away from the bottle before it explodes in your face. That is getting the big picture of a science experiment. As for the other benefits of doing science with your kids, I’ll list a few here:

Science teaches kids about the world around them and opens their eyes to things they never paid attention to before. Kids begin to see why the light turns on when you use a switch, why their swings on the swing set move in a certain direction or how milk goes bad after a certain date. Things are happening in their world and until they begin to study some science, they are pretty much oblivious to it.

Science helps kids form a healthy sense of skepticism as they begin to ask why and want real answers. This time around, when your child asks ‘Why is the sky blue?’, they are not going to take “Because God colored it that way.” as an answer. You’ll have to give them the real answer and then give them a book on color and waves. By the way, according to NASA, ” Blue light is scattered in all directions by the tiny molecules of air in Earth’s atmosphere. Blue is scattered more than other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.”

And last but not least, science can spark your kid’s mind so that they too want to solve puzzles and find answers… answers that may someday lead to helping with some of today’s world problems.

Some pretty great reasons to do some science in your cubby houses! Enjoy.