The Magic School Bus: Slime and Polymer Lab

My kids are crazy about things that fly. We have more airplanes, gliders, kites and helicopters that should be legal. Sometimes I wonder if we should call our house a museum and open doors to public.When we are not playing with planes, baking airplane shaped cookies, reading books about airplanes and designing our own models we like to do science kits. Today I’m going to tell you about our experience with Magic School Bus Soaring into Flight Kit.Airplanes fly. We all know it. How? Is it because they have “jet engine”? Hmm, maybe not, I heard shape has to do something with it. I couldn’t be sure. As a parent of children, who have one thousand questions about airplanes, I found myself completely unprepared to answer most of them. Maybe I slept through the aerodynamics course back in high school (wait, did we have aerodynamics class in high school?).Every time my kids stumble upon a topic I don’t know much anything about (slugs, puke, ghosts, they have diverse interests), I learn about it along with them. And I always appreciate a good resource to help us on our learning adventure. Soaring into Flight is a great learning tool. It might not answer ALL the questions, but it will sure explain a lot.Some experiments are simple. They are simple because they use everyday things to demonstrate scientific concepts. I think this simplicity is a genius. It elevates the mundane to the level of scientific investigation. What will happen if you drink the juice out of a juice box and keep sucking in on the straw? What’s the hypothesis? Results? Conclusions? One minute we were just drinking juice, and now we are talking about air pressure, a topic pertinent to the science behind flight.In another experiment we made four different paper airplanes and tested, which one is the best. I was utterly surprised to find that a large paper clip attached to the tip of a paper airplane makes it flight farther. Why did it happen? So many hot topics to talk about here: weight, faster moving air, lift, how design affects performance. We made lots of paper airplanes in the past, but never once I thought about such simple thing as testing different designs to see which one is most efficient. Science is everywhere.The kit includes 12 hands on experiments. Each experiment addresses a topic related to flying. I love the explanations that come with each experiment. It helped me to figure out the main concepts involved. If it whetted our appetite for more, we got a book specifically on that subject.Explore the Kit… without the kidsIf you want to keep your sanity, I suggest you first explore the kit without the kids. Lock yourself up some place quite (try a bathroom, if all else fails) and read the booklet. No, it’s not the case of it being so good; you need to enjoy it in private. Remember that moment when you bring a cake with lighted birthday candles into a room? Everybody squeals with delight. The excitement is flying high. And then a birthday child blows the candles and the room erupts into cheers. I thought I would go for that set up. We all gathered around a table. With lots of whooping, cheers, and excited giggles we ceremoniously opened the box, took out the parts and…. All hell broke loose. Ok, Ok, I’m exaggerated. What really happened was that the noise level went through the roof with three excited kids simultaneously asking questions, demanding to know what each part is for and …there was me trying against all odds to concentrate my mind on what I’m reading, while talking to them “No you can’t take this out of the room! I don’t know what this is for! I’m trying to read!” Just trust me: you need to know which one is a pump and what’s there for.Let them explore the kit before you try the experimentsNo matter how fun are the experiments, for kids half the fun is touching everything and trying to figure out what they can do with it. Look! Mom! It’s on my head! I can even shove it in my… (ok, you don’t really want to know the specifics). One good rule to implement at this stage is that everything has to stay in one room … or you will not see some parts again until Christmas.Materials in the kitLet me tell you first about the things you will need that are NOT included in a kit: baking soda, vinegar, juice box, a pair of chairs, tape, and scissors. The kit contains: parachute, 3 balloons, 2 ping pong balls, 2 paper clips, strip of paper, dowel, string, measuring cup, paper plane models, 3 foam rockets, paper tape measure, elastic band, funnel, glider, clothespin, rocket launcher, spinner.Experiments Overview:Experiment 1 – Air Pressure: Collapse a Juice BoxBuy a juice box and drink all the juice out of the box. Continue sucking on the straw once the box is empty.Experiment 2 – High-Low Pressure: Move floating ping pong ballsHang two ping pong balls about 1 inch apart and blow between them. Fast moving air causes objects to move.Experiment 3 – Flapping Motion: Make Paper RisePlace a strip of paper under a lower lip and blow. The flapping = lift and upward motion.Experiment 4 – Paper Airplane RaceFold four slightly different paper airplanes (models in the kit). Throw each one and decide which design works best.Experiment 5 – SteeringFold one more paper airplane (from the kit). Experiment with folding ailerons up and down to move airplane to the right/left.Experiment 6 – Fly a GliderThrow a glider (from the kit) and measure the distance that glider went with the tape measure (provided in the kit).Experiment 7 – How Jet Engines Work (the most exciting of all experiments)Blow up a balloon and close it with a clothespin. Tape it to a straw, which has a string passing throw it. The string is stretched between two chairs. Take the clothespin off…. The air leaving balloon pushes it forward. My kids wanted to do this one again and again and again.Experiment 8 – Launch your rocketPress down on the pump of the rocket launcher (everything included in a kit). (Very exciting!!!)Experiment 9 – Launch your rocket using baking soda and vinegar as a fuel (one of the top liked experiments)Put vinegar in a pump, put baking soda in the rocket launcher. Quickly place the pump in the rocket launcher and … BLAST into space!Experiment 10 – Helicopter fun: make a spinner soarUse a spinner (provided in a kit) to see how the moving rotors of the helicopter work.Experiment 11 – GravityDrop a piece of a paper and pencil. The focus is on how fast something falls down.Experiment 12 – Experiment with ParachuteSail large and small parachute. Does size make a difference?In conclusion: if you are looking for a fun way to learn about flying, this kit proved to be entertaining. And with the current promotion it’s only $13 (free shipping).You can find more information on my blog http://www.kidminds.org/2015/10/soaring-into-flight-science-class-at.html

My son loves receiving things in the mail. I am a science teacher so I thought this would be a great gift for him. We recieved our first month in August and I was thrilled to see 8 experiments. However, the experiments require many materials from home to complete. I also purchased the kit when it was on sale for $120. That is why I gave it a 4 star review. I feel that for $10 a month for these kits is a great deal. If I would have paid $240 for this ket, I would have been very disappointed.

I homeschool my 2nd grade & preschooler. We studied rainbows briefly in our science curriculum, and did one experiment, but they were asking more questions than I had the answers to. Always wanting to encourage their educational interests, I got online for supplemental information. Given that I also have a baby, and live in a small town without any kind of good store for things like this, I don't have tons of time to spend gathering lesson plans & random materials from various places.I ordered the Magic School Bus kit because it seemed the best of the light & color options available. We LOVE the Magic School Bus series and own nearly every single book; my daughter even had a Magic School Bus themed birthday party one year. However, because of the mixed reviews I wasn't sure what to expect. Now that we've received the kit, I wanted to add my own two cents.The actual scientific materials that are included are probably things you could gather at an educational supply store and grocery store. Nothing too unusual or hard to find. Crayons, a blank CD, petri dish, eye dropper, color paddles, rainbow blasses, LED flashlight, food coloring, etc. However, having them all in the box provided is worth a significant amount to me, and me going out & purchasing the items I didn't already have at home would have cost me at least half the price of the kit. I absolutely love the booklet that comes with the items though. It's a full sheet of paper size, full color 20 page booklet that has Ms. Frizzle and all of the students featured in a very child friendly format. Each experiment begins with a question, hypothesis, method, and then a place for the child to write the results & conclusions. Complete with color drawings of the steps of the experiment too. This will make an amazing addition for her science notebook we are keeping for her portfolio.Overall, I feel like the kit is well worth the money. The full size color booklet was a definite great surprise, several of the science items we'll be able to reuse again, and most of the experiments can be done more than once. I'm planning on asking for other kits for the children for Christmas. I would higly recommend.

This kit was a lot of fun. The kids loved it. We even combined some of the experiments to create new ones for more fun. We did most of them on St. Patrick's Day to tie into the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I only gave it 4 stars because of the experiment that uses crayons to create a color wheel. The round cardboard they provided was too slick for the crayons they provided. The colors would not go onto the cardboard well. Plus the crayon colors they provided were horrible. Instead of providing the needed red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, they provided 2 peachy color, a very light yellow, a green, and two blue colors. We just threw them into the kids crayons and grabbed some crayons with more appropriate colors. We used a yellow highlighter for the yellow section because the cardboard was just too shiny-coated to allow any yellow to show up. It would have better if they just would have provided a pre-made color wheel instead of crayons and cardboard. We have not done all the experiments yet. We put the rainbow glasses over the video camera lense to record what we saw and it worked great. Picture is what you see through the rainbow glasses when you look at a kitchen light. The kids loved the rainbow glasses. We also had some balloons with LED lights in them from a birthday and we looked at the balloons with the glasses also.

Grand, but not much to it really.

A Christmas gift. Seems great! I will update once the recipient lets me know what she thinks.

My daughter loved this set. We ordered it from amazon in Mexico. It took over three months to arrive and we were already finished the human body unit. She just used the set for fun and did a couple of the experiments over the summer. It was for homeschooling Grade 5 curriculum. The poster of the body is huge.

We are studying flight for homeschool this year (grade 6). These experiments are simple and could be done at grade 3-7 and teach properties of flight. Great product with simple lessons and experiments.

Llego muy a tiempo, es mas caja que producto, y uno de los ingredientes es BORAX, lo cual considero poco pertinente que se use en un juguete infantil. En definitiva me esperaba otra cosa.