July Nature Seekers 4 H Meeting

Normally we meet in June and take off July, but June had a lot of things going on and I could not squeeze a meeting in.  I was trying to think of a good meeting idea for July and since it is so hot decided we would have our topic be water.  I got on Pinterest and found some fun ideas to have at a water themed meeting.

I had a list of fun facts about water printed out and started out the meeting with those.  While I was doing that, my older boys and one of the mamas were filling squirt guns with water and paint for our next activity: squirt gun painting.  I had to buy the squirt guns and paper ( I used water color paper), and used tempera washable paint that I had at my house.  We were supposed to mix the paint and water 50/50 but we added some extra water so the paintings came out a little thinner than the example that we made at home but the children had fun making these paintings.

After that we did two water experiments.  One was called walking water.  You need three glass jars that are the same size, a paper towel torn in half and folded in half, and two colors of food coloring.  Fill the outside jars with food coloring and leave the middle jar empty.  Put one end of the paper towel in the jar with the water and the other end in the empty jar.  The water will walk up the paper towel and start filling the empty jar.  This does take awhile.  After an hour there was water in the middle jar.  Eventually all three jars are supposed to have the same water level.  This would be a great experiment to do at home.

We did another water experiment called leak proof bag.  Fill a ziplock bag with water and close it.  Stab some very sharp pencils through the bag.  The bag will not leak.

Next up was soap foam painting.  Each child got a bowl, a straw, and a piece of water color paper.  I put a good squeeze of dish soap in the bowl and filled it with water.  The children blew bubbles with the straw.  After they had a good amount of bubbles I put a few drops of food coloring in the bubbles and they placed their paper over top.  The soap foam made a pretty design on the paper.  I had them blow bubbles again and put a different coloring food coloring.  The paintings turned out really cool.

After that we used their same bowls and made bubble snakes.  A plastic water bottle with the bottom cut off and an old sock was all that we needed.  Place the sock over the bottom of the bottle, dip it in the soap solution and blow.  The children were pretty impressed with this bubble blower.

Next up was ice cream in a bag.  This was a challenge because our ice was melting really fast and so was our ice cream once it was made.  But they enjoyed it.

Then we did a water balloon toss.

And for our last activity we made pool noodle boats out of a piece of pool noodle, straw, and foam triangle with two holes punched it in.

This meeting lasted about an hour and 20 minutes and the children had a great time!