Caroline and I, who love to cook together, have taken our cooking experience to a whole new level. We just returned from a field trip with her 3rd grade SPARK group and we went to Roberson Museum. I have to admit that the other few times I have been to this museum were little more than dull. Needless to say, I wasn't thrilled about the prospect of being with a group of unruly eight year olds from 10am-2pm. Rather than touring and observing as a typical museum, they had several experiments set up for the kids to do, and all the kids acted much more mature than their 8 years, so I was pleasantly surprised.
The highlight of the day was making ice cream with liquid nitrogen. I am a little surprised that they would trust such young kids around this stuff--but they all did a great job. They used the basic ingredients of homemade ice cream- heavy cream, half-n-half, sugar, vanilla and then poured a ladle of liquid nitrogen in the bowl. As the kids stirred the ingredients, the liquid was transformed quickly to rock-hard ice cream (very similar to Dippin' Dots--just a much bigger dot)!
We also did a chromatography experiment with M&Ms and the colored candy coating on them. I won't bore you with the details, because it was complicated stuff, but the kids really seemed to get the jist of what was going on. The last thing they did was to go into the planeterium and learn to identify all sorts of stars and constellations.
Last but not least, was lunch along with a trip to the souvenier shop. Caroline used her allowance money to get herself a polished stone rock, and yet another, overpriced but adorable, stuffed cat!
ps--Caroline was not the "designated stirrer" so the girl in the photograph is a classmate.
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