I spied

Here are the photos from my camera. I'll have to take a couple more and put them here, but since I'm home and work is at, well, work, it will be later.

I told the kids that the elephants at the zoo had been getting a lot of cavities, and no one knew why until they watched the elephants getting ready for bed and saw that they were not brushing their teeth!

When the elephants were asked why, they said that someone had stolen their toothpaste. I suggested that since we didn't know who had taken it, or why, that it might be better just to mix up some of our own.

We headed off to the gym to find the first clue when my friend and his kids showed up, so we did the yoga before we wandered through the school doing the rest of our chemical hunt.  I work with kids. Have to be flexible. :)

Photo #1 should be self explanatory, but of course we were wandering around the school and I had forgotten to bring the mirror I purchased specifically for that purpose. ::smacking own forehead:::

So I told Reese* to hold it up to the light backwards. Which taught them another way to read mirror writing.
What was funny was how many kids were very impressed.
"How did you DO that??"



Next code you'll have to decipher yourself.
Key is the photo below it. Blogger hates me and won't let me drag and drop photos the way I want them. Seems that everyone I know who puts photos on their blog has the same trouble, and they either quit posting photos or give up trying to put them into any semblance of order.

 Next code is actually the easiest code I know, and because we did some code work about a month ago in preparation for this last week, I didn't have to explain to anyone how to decipher it. The ones who knew helped the ones who did not know.

  After that is a container of yeast. But did I write yeast on the label? No I did not. All the kids know the word yeast, but not many of them knew the word catalyst. They do now.

 The first clue, which, if I could figure out how to do it, would be first on this page, was a puzzle I bought at the dollar store and assembled before writing on it. Excuse the glare. As busy as that afternoon was, it's amazing I'm posting photos at all. :)

Too hot to go out or a cold, cold wet day? This is where we go to play!

This was 'ingredient E'
Dawn dish detergent.

There was a second puzzle. The kids collected pieces of it at each stop and assembled it at the end. I don't have a photo, although I thought I did. It read, 'Blowing up is NOT cool. Mix ingredients in ABC order!'

I know at least one kid took me seriously, because I overheard Elaine* telling her mom, "We had to be VERY CAREFUL with the chemicals because we did not want to blow up!"

I'll post a photo of the 'elephant toothpaste' we made when I get my other camera card from work.

Since we did the kid version, it was safe to touch. I did not ask them to observe or tell me what they found out, but the shouts of "Wow!" and "Hey! That's warm!!" proved they figured it out anyway.

I did tell them it was an exothermic reaction, but I didn't remember to say it until most of my kids had gone home for the afternoon. I'll have to mix up another batch of 'toothpaste' sometime, I think.

I wish I could show you the kid yoga photos. Little pretzels, they were.
My friend and his daughters were terrific. One brought her own spy gear to show the kids, and he dressed all in black and incorporated the whole spy theme into the yoga, asking them, "What would you use this move for if you were a spy?"

The kids just loved it.

It took a bit of preparation, and we ended up not being able to complete all the activities for the week due to time constraints, but I have to tell you. When a kid comes to you and says, "This is my favorite week EVER!" it makes the investment of time worth it.

I put in approximately four hours off the clock getting ready, and still haven't finished bringing everything home that I hauled in to use.

I figure we'll eventually have time to get to our other activities, they don't have to be part of official spy week to be fun or appreciated by the kids. They're open to trying all kinds of new things.

The codes fascinated Reese. I was busy into the evening writing up other things for him to solve, and I'm searching for a book I have around the house somewhere that has a bunch of kid codes in it. I know he'd enjoy reading it.

So there's a condensed version of some of the stuff we did on only one day of spy week.

I'll try to remember to bring home the photo card with the pics of fingerprint art and elephant toothpaste.

Happy Monday, y'all.