Happy Leap Day!

So in honor of leap day, we did a few frog related activities around here. Not too much, because, well, the kids had a very in-depth, involved game going on in which they were pretending to be doctors and veterinarians and they NEEDED to take care of their animals and baby dolls. And frankly, I think that sort of play is precious and actually important so we only interrupted for a bit.

We found some frog noises on the internet and they had a blast listening to them and I heard "play it again mom!" lots of times - who knew frog noises could be so exciting?

Then we tried to do a little science experiment with magnets with the goal of creating some leaping frogs. Although we had fun making everything, they didn't quite work out as we hoped ....

First we decorated some shoe boxes to look like a place a frog might be. We cut out a tissue paper frog. Then we took a paperclip with string tied on it and taped it to the back of the frog.
The theory being that if we put a magnet on top of the box, the frog would "jump up" to the magnet. The truth was that, our magnet was not strong enough to pull the frog up. The box was probably too high. And the magnet and the paperclip had to be VERY close together for the magnet to actually pull the paperclip ...


I know it looks like they are touching, but I assure they are not. However, that was the farthest apart we could get them to stay. So, we didn't get "leaping" frogs, but we did make a pretty neat "floating" frog!
I told the girls next time we go out, we'll look for more powerful magnets and maybe we can have leaping frogs someday!

As a bonus though, we had to try out a LOT of magnets to even get the floating affect so we talked about how magnets come in different strengths and tested out if it could pull the paperclip and all that stuff, so at least we did some magnet exploring today!

Anyway, happy leap day! =)