Driveway experiments

B, the boy from 2 doors down, came to the car as I pulled into the driveway a couple of days ago. He is 3 or 4 years older than Reid and speaks only a little English but he and Reid manage to play fairly well together. Though Reid has been learning French, she doesn’t speak in front of me, though she does understand what B and I say to one another. In any case, Reid and B were playing on the driveway while I unloaded the car and started supper. Reid appeared to say that she was “making an experiment” and need a knife, “but don’t worry, a butter knife will work”, a plastic glass, strainer and a cookie tray. I talked her into an old cake pan and she went back outside to conduct her experiment. I was called out to see the results shortly thereafter. It turns out if you mix flakes of sidewalk chalk and bubble juice in a rusty cake pan, you get a grayish-brown liquid. I should have asked Reid if her hypothesis had predicted that outcome.

Something about the liquid made Reid think about how a sugar bush works. She explained to me about collecting sap from a tree (in our case, a whirly-gig flower we were imagining was a tree), putting it in a pan over a fire and boiling it down and then pouring out maple syrup. I guess that she *does* remember something from daycare or school despite daily declarations of “I don’t remember” when I ask her about her day.

This entry was posted on April 16, 2010 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Pastimes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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