We got one of each: a penny, a nickel, a dime, and a quarter--and placed them on a paper towel on our table. Then I filled a dropper up with water and had a cup of it on hand to refill the dropper as needed. We made a chart to keep track of our predictions and results. I talked to the kids about which coin was biggest and which was smallest and which one we thought would be able to hold the most amounts of drops on the top of it. Then we made predictions for the penny and I had the kids watch and help me count as we dropped the drops of water onto it. I kept pointing out to them how the water bubbled up like a big balloon on top of the coin. Then, when too many drops were added onto the coin, the water popped and spilled out, just like a balloon. Sort of. Anyway.We continued to do this for all the coins. We talked a lot about bigger vs. smaller and how our predictions should reflect that. The boys wanted to know why the water bubbled up, so I ended up drawing a few pictures and resulting to phrases like "the water has something like a skin on the top of it that holds it in," or "the water is kind of like a balloon-you can fill it up and up and up and the skin over the top will hold, until you fill it up too much and then it pops like a balloon." We filled the penny up a couple of more times and I had the kids look at it right at eye level, from the side view, so they could really notice how big the "balloon" of water gets and what it looks like when the "balloon" of water finally pops.
We had a good time with this. It really helped a lot to take the time to draw the extra pictures as I was explaining.
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