Getting wet on a hot summer day is a part of camp that girls look forward to every year.  For this activity, you will need at least one balloon.

Keep in mind, this isn’t a water balloon fight – it’s a challenge!

How many times can you and a partner toss a water balloon back and forth before someone misses and gets wet?

If you don’t have a partner, how many times can you toss it up and catch it before YOU get wet?

You can make the challenge harder as you go by moving further apart or by tossing the balloon higher each time.

Don’t forget to clean up the pieces of the popped balloons.  Girl Scouts always clean up their trash to help protect nature.

Scientists use many different types of instruments to measure many different things. Scales for measuring weight and thermometers for temperature are two examples you’ve seen before.  Scientists who study things like the environment, the oceans, and the weather use an instrument called an anemometer that measures the speed of the wind.

For this activity, you need:
5 small paper cups
2 straws
A new pencil
A bag of air dry clay
A sewing pin or push pin
Tape
Sharpie or markers
A good pair of scissors

1. On one of your cups, draw four dots just below the rim of the cup.  These dots should be evenly spaced so they are on opposite sides of the cup from each other.  Draw another dot in the middle of the bottom of the cup.
2. Using your sharp scissors, carefully punch holes where your dots are.
3. Thread one of the straws through a pair of upper holes.  Thread the other straw through the other pair.
   
4. Thread a cup on to the end of each straw. Use pieces of tape to secure the straw in place so the cup can’t slide back off.  As you work, make sure the cups are all facing in the same direction. Think of all the horses facing forward as a merry-go-round spins.
   
5. Slide your pencil up through the hole in the center of your middle cup.  Carefully push your pin through the two straws and then into the eraser of the pencil.
6. Next, make a stand for your anemometer.  Mold the air dry clay around the base of the pencil.  You are hoping for a wide base with a tall section around the pencil.  Once you have a shape you like, wiggle the pencil around a bit to make the hole a little wider.  While gently turning the pencil, pull the pencil back out and set your stand aside to dry.  This can take several days.
   
   Note: Once the clay dries, the pencil should be able to spin freely in the stand.
   If you find your air dry clay stand is too short or too light, you can also use an empty water bottle.  Partly fill the bottle with sand or pebbles to add some weight.

You can use your anemometer to tell how fast the wind is blowing!  How?

• Use your markers to color one of the cups a bright color, something you can spot really well as the anemometer turns.
• When the anemometer is spinning in the wind, count how many times that cup goes by in 10 seconds.
• Use this chart to find roughly how fast the wind is blowing.
  

This chart is from WindAndWeatherTools.com

For this activity, you will need:
4 large, colored craft sticks
A piece of yarn
A piece of deli paper (wax paper or tracing paper works, too)
Some colored tissue paper
A paint brush
Glue
Scissors
Pencil

1. Lay two craft sticks on your table. Glue the piece of yarn to one end of both sticks.
2. Glue the other two sticks to the first two so you make a frame. The yarn ends up sandwiched between the sticks.
   
3. Let the glue dry completely before continuing.
4. Trace your frame onto the deli paper and cut out the shape. Use a thin line of glue to glue the piece of deli paper to your frame.
   
5. While you wait for the deli paper’s glue to dry, decide what picture you will make. You can make a design, a mosaic, a picture, or just something colorful – the choice is yours!
6. Once you decide what you want to make, cut or tear your colored tissue paper into small pieces.
7. Using your paint brush, brush a thin layer of glue onto the front of your framed paper.  Stick small pieces of the colored tissue paper into the glue to make the design you chose.
   
8. Once it’s dry, find a sunny window to hang it.

Every year at day camp, we have an outdoor cooking station.  We’ve done sous vide omelettes, hamburger foil packets, hash browns, and of course, ice cream in a bag.

For this yummy treat, you will need:
Sprinkles
A one gallon plastic bag
1/4 cup of rock salt
A quart ziplock freezer or storage bag
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla
2 tablespoons of sugar
1 cup of half-n-half (almond, oat, or soy based unsweetened creamer works too)
3 cups of ice

1. Pour the sugar, vanilla, and half-n-half into the the quart bag.
2. Add anything else you want in your ice cream (see the variations below).
3. Seal the quart bag, making sure to squeeze out as much air as possible and making sure it is well sealed.
4. Gently massage the bag to mix the ingredients.
5. Pour the ice and rock salt into the gallon bag.
6. Place the quart bag inside the gallon bag.  Squeeze as much air as possible out of the gallon bag and seal it.
7. Shake the bag and gently bounce it on a counter or table for 15 minutes or until the ice cream is thick and ready to eat.  The more you mix it, the creamier your final ice cream will be.  If your fingers get too cold, put a small towel around your bag or wear mittens.
8. When ready to eat, wipe off the outside of the quart bag before opening it.  This will remove most of the salt water so it doesn’t get into your ice cream.
9. Spoon your ice cream into a bowl and add the sprinkles!

Variations:

• Chocolate Ice Cream: Add a 1/2 tablespoon of baking cocoa powder and an additional 1 tablespoon of sugar to the quart sized bag before mixing it up.
• Strawberry Ice Cream: Chop a medium sized strawberries into small pieces.  Add them to the quart sized bag before mixing it up.
• Other fruit flavors: You can chop up any berries and most other fruits you like!  However, do not use citrus fruits or other acidic fruits.  The acid in the fruit may curdle your half-n-half.

Other Notes:

• Why Ziplock baggies?  We’ve tried many brands for this activity.  The store brand baggies tend to leak at the seams, which either allows salt water to leak into the ice cream (yuck!) or allows salt water to leak all over your counter (ewww!).  We have not tried Glad brand bags.
• Can you use plastic containers instead?  Yes!  This is a great way to reduce plastic waste. You can put your quart baggie, ice, and salt into a large bowl that has a tight fitting lid.  Shake the large bowl well, just like you would do with the gallon bag in Step 7.
• Why do you need salt? If you tried to turn half-n-half into ice cream with just plain ice, the ice would melt long before the half-n-half froze.  When you add salt to the ice, it lowers the freezing point of the water.  So as the salty ice begins to melt, it pulls heat from anything nearby – like the mixture in your ice cream bag!  This is why they put salt on the roads in places where it snows.  The salt lowers the freezing point of the water (melted snow) that is on the road.  This helps keep that water from turning into dangerous ice.
• Why do you need to shake and bounce your bag? Ice cream is an emulsion.  That means it’s a mixture of several things that don’t normally like to mix – like oil and water!  When you shake the baggie, the fats and water in the half and half break up into tiny drops that are all mixed together.  If you stop mixing, the tiny drops group together until the fats and water are separate again. When you keep shaking while also making it freeze,  the little drops of water form ice crystals that break into smaller crystals.  These small ice crystals mix with the little bubbles of milk fat and become trapped as the mixture freezes, forming an emulsion!  The more you mix it, the smaller the crystals will be and the creamier your ice cream will be.

The lava lamps you see in the stores use wax and heat to work.  The light bulb heats up the wax at the bottom of the lamp.  As it gets hot, the wax expands and it’s density decreases.  When the density of the wax is lower than the density of the water, the wax floats to the top of the lamp.  When the wax is at the top and away from the light bulb, it begins to cool back down.  As it cools, it shrinks and it’s density increases.  This makes it sink back to the bottom where the process starts all over again!

We are going to make a lava lamp that doesn’t need electricity and heat.
You’ll need:
A flat bottomed test test with a cap or a small jar
Food coloring
Fizzy Tablets (Alka-seltzer type tablets work well)
Some cooking oil (mineral oil or baby oil also work well)
Water

1. Food coloring can stain so be sure you are wearing clothes that are ok to get dirty.  Be sure to protect your work surface too.
2. Put a few drops of food coloring in your tube.
3. Fill the tube about half way with oil.  What did the food coloring do?
4. Now fill the rest of the tube with water.  What did the food coloring do this time?
5. Put the cap on your tube and gently shake the tube to mix everything together.  Let it sit for a few minutes and watch what happens.
6. Once everything settles back down, you’ll have two layers – a colored water layer and a layer of oil.
   
7. Now comes the fun part!  Break a fizzy tablet into smaller pieces.  Drop a piece into the tube and watch what happens!  What does the tablet do when it hits the oil?  What does it do once it sinks down to the water layer?

If you run out of tablet pieces, you can still make and watch bubbles by gently shaking the capped tube first.  Now, instead of rising, the colored bubbles sink!  Why?

Everything around you is made of different types of atoms and atoms are made of several different teeny-tiny parts, too!  One of these parts is called electrons.  When you rub a balloon on your hair, some of the electrons from your hair JUMP over to the balloon.  That means the balloon now has too many electrons (and a negative charge) and your hair now has too few electrons (and a positive charge).   When things have opposite charges, like one is positive and one is negative, they stick together! 

But what happens when two things have the same charge? Instead of sticking to each other, they get pushed apart and we can use that to make tinsel fly!

For this activity, you will need:
Tinsel strands
A piece of wool fabric
A piece of PVC pipe, 18″ to 24″ long

1. Lay 6 strands of tinsel down on a table.  Tie a knot at both ends, with the knots 4 to 6 inches apart.
2. Trim off the long tails from both ends.
3. Put the wool fabric over one shoulder, hold the tinsel by one of the knots with that same hand and the PVC pipe with the other hand.
4. Rub the pipe against the wool while you count to 25. Some of the electrons from the wool are jumping over to the pipe.
5. Touch the tinsel with the pipe. This makes some of the electrons from the pipe jump to the tinsel.  Now both the tinsel and the pipe have the same charge and like charges will push away from each other!
6. Now rub the pipe against the wool again to get more electrons onto the pipe.
7. Ready for the trick?
8. Hold your pipe out in front of you, about waist high, and hold your tinsel out a couple of feet above the pipe.
9. Now drop your tinsel onto the pipe!

As the tinsel drops towards the pipe, the extra electrons in both the tinsel and the pipe repel each other. Even the individual strands of the tinsel will push away from each other, turning them into a flying ball!

Did your tinsel stick to your pipe instead?  No worries!  This trick is tricky to master!  Keep trying!  If you get frustrated, set it aside for awhile, even a day or two, and then try again.  If you keep trying, we promise you’ll get it!

So what is the chalk for?

Shadows grow and shrink all through the day.  Using your chalk and something like a lamp post, a tree, or even yourself, you can make a huge sundial on the sidewalk!  Trace the shadow you picked, write the current time next to it, and come back in an hour to see how the shadow has changed.

You will need:
A bendy straw
A really big nail (about as big around as your straw)
A pom pom
Safety goggles
An empty, clean water or soda bottle with its cap
A hammer
A good pair of scissors

Using your scissors, carefully cut off the “funnel” portion at the top of your bottle.

Put on your safety goggles.  Whenever you use a tool, there is a chance that something might get hit wrong, sending something flying right towards your face and eyes. The safety goggles will protect your eyes.

Place the bottle cap on a safe surface for hammering.  You will be punching a hole through the lid so be sure it’s OK to drive a nail into whatever surface the cap is on – outside on the grass or dirt might be best.

Drive the nail right through the center of the cap.  Once it’s through, twist it around to make sure the hole is smooth and round.  Remove the nail.

Poke the short end of your bendy straw through the cap.  If your hole is a bit too small, put the nail back in and wiggle it around some more to make the hole bigger. If your hole is a bit too big, you can try again with a different cap or seal the area around the straw with glue.

Put the pom pom inside your bottle top and blow through the straw.  Why does the pom pom float?  Why do you think it spins?

Cameras are everywhere these days. In phones, computers, tablets, and sometimes even all alone by themselves. In the modern age most cameras are digital, which means they store pictures using electronic memory like computers. In the not-too-distant past, cameras used materials that were photosensitive, which means that they change when light is shined on them. Light from the outside world would shine on the photosensitive materials and leave an image on it.

Back before anyone invented photosensitive materials, though, people were still experimenting with ways of capturing an image of the world with a box they could look through. The camera obscura (Latin for “dark chamber”) is one of the ways they did this, and humans have been building camera obscuras for thousands of years, since ancient Greece.  Some are so big you can sit inside! (This one is in New York).

Today you’re going to follow in that grand tradition and build your own camera obscura that will allow you to see the world in a very different way!

You’ll need:
A piece of deli paper
A toothpick
Black electrical tape
A push pin
Painters tape or other tape
An empty cereal box or other, similarly shaped box
A pencil or pen
Good scissors

(1) Using your scissors, cut all the way around the cereal box a few inches above the bottom. You want your cut to be as straight as possible. When you are finished, the cereal box should be in two pieces: the short bottom section and the rest of the box.

(2) Trace the box bottom on the piece of deli paper and carefully cut out the tracing.

(3) Using your tape, attach the paper rectangle to the box bottom. Fold any extra paper over the sides of the box and tape it down. Make sure the paper is as smooth and flat as possible by pulling all four sides nice and tight as you tape them down.

(4) Using the electrical tape, tape the bottom of the cereal box back into position, so that the paper you just attached is sandwiched between the two pieces.  Electrical tape is opaque, which means light can’t get through it and into your camera obscura.

(5) Cut an eye hole out of one of the top flaps on the box.  Then use the electrical tape to tape the top closed.
NOTE: We recommend putting your eye hole in the middle – where the “ee” in the Cheerios box is located, not over to one side like we’ve done in this box.

(6) Tape all the seams on the bottom of the box so light can’t get through them.  Then use your pin to poke a hole right in the center of the bottom of the box.  If you look close, you can see the head of a pin in the middle of one of the “e’s” in the picture below.

(7) Use your toothpick to make the hole a bit bigger.  This hole lets the light into the box.  The light will shine on the rectangle of paper and will project an image of whatever the box is aimed at.

(8) Go outside. Point the bottom of the box at something well lit by sunshine.  Look through the eye hole on the top of the box.

HINTS:
You may need to use one hand to shade your eyes from the sunshine.
You will need to give your eyes a few moments to adjust to the dim light inside the box.
Things with a lot of contrast work best – like a tree with the sky behind it.

What do you see on the paper inside the box?  What’s weird about what you see?  Why do you think that is happening?

What to know more?  Read on!

Did you notice anything weird when you were looking through your camera obscura? Maybe you noticed that everything you look at looks upside-down? It’s pretty strange!

This happens because of the way the light moves through the pinhole. You’re looking at objects that are way bigger than the pinhole. The light coming off of them only travels in straight lines, so when the light from the top of the object goes through the pinhole, it’s moving down towards it. It keeps going down and ends up on the bottom of your paper screen. The opposite is true of the light from the bottom of the object: it moves up to the pinhole and ends up on the top of your paper! Think of it like spraying a garden hose through a little hole in the fence. If you spray from above the hole, the water will shoot down out the other side, and if you spray from under the hole it will shoot up when it comes out.

Your eye actually works the same way. The light gets flipped going through your eyes, since they’re small holes, too, and when it hits the back of your eye and starts to travel to your brain the whole world is upside-down! Luckily, your brain knows better and flips it back right-side up for you.

Experiment with the size of the pinhole. You can wiggle the toothpick around in the hole to make it bigger or use something else to make the hole bigger. Bigger holes will let more light through so you can see dimmer objects, but they will make it harder to focus and get a good view of what you’re looking at.  If you decide your hole is too big, you can always cover it with a small piece of electrical tape and make a new hole.

We got this activity from The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.  If you liked it, check out their other activities!

Scientists work all over the world, in labs and offices, in jungles and desserts, even in the oceans and at the South Pole.  One of the many things they do is try to find animals and plants that no one has ever found before.  Right now, we know of about 1,600,000 species on our planet – and that’s a LOT of different plants, animals, and other living things – but scientists estimate there are around 8,700,000 species.  That means there are over 7 MILLION species still to be discovered on Earth!

For this activity, you get to create your very own, unique species.  How?  By making a rock creature!

You’ll need:
Googly eyes
Pipe cleaners and other things to decorate with
Some crayons
A rock
Glue
A piece of parchment paper

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees
2. Place the parchment paper on an oven proof baking sheet.
3. Figure out which side of your rock you want to be the top of your new creature. Place your rock, that side up, on the parchment paper.
4. Once the oven is preheated, heat the rock in the oven for about ten minutes. (Use parental help if needed.)
5. Get your crayons ready while you are waiting.
6. Carefully take the tray out of the oven and place it on a heat-safe surface.
7. Without touching the hot rock with your fingers, draw on it with your crayons. As you color, the wax of the crayons will melt, giving your rock a colorful shell.
8. Once your rock is cool, glue on the eyes and use other items to decorate your creature.  She’s your creature!  Will she be a bug?  A bird?  A mammal?  Something else?  Make her as wonderful and unique as you!

Check out this adorable creature from a fellow camper!