Please welcome Amber, a friend of mine from college, to the blog!
I’m so excited to be guest blogging here at Greening Sam and Avery! While we are avid recyclers at my house I would not exactly call my family “green”. I use way too many paper products (plates, napkins, paper towels, etc) to make my life a bit easier and to limit the number of times I have to run the dishwasher or wash dishes by hand every day. The point of me telling you all of this is because Abbie continually inspires me to try to become more green and teach my children more about the earth which they are lucky enough to inhabit. My parents live on a farm so my children (5 and 1 ½) are exposed to that environment, but I want to teach them more about the surroundings in our day-to-day life.
While looking for a project to do with my kids I wanted to stay true to things we like to do, but just do them in a different way. I came across a solar oven project that seemed a perfect fit for my family. My daughter (5) loves to make/build things and food is always popular in this house, so I gathered the supplies and we set out making our oven. A very simple list of supplies: black poster board, cardboard box, tinfoil, scissors, hot glue.
I cut the poster board in half lengthwise and glued the ends together and covered one side with tinfoil. (I hot glued the tinfoil to the poster board)
Put a piece of poster board at the bottom of the cardboard box. Roll the tinfoil covered piece into a cone/circular shape and stick in the cardboard box with the tinfoil facing in.
Our oven looks different than the picture on the website, but we just went with it! Brianna set out putting together s’mores. The direction said to put the s’mores in a plastic bag, but in trying to be environmentally friendly we put ours on a dark plate and put them inside the oven.
We put the oven out on our deck and set the timer for 20 minutes.
After 20 minutes the chocolate was really melted, but the marshmallows were not (the marshmallows were a little dried out). We waited another 20 minutes. This part was hard for Brianna, all of the waiting, but I tried to explain to her what was happening and how the sun was cooking the s’mores. She sort of understood how it worked, but in her 5 year old mind, she just wanted to eat the s’mores. After 40 minutes we removed the s’mores. The chocolate was very melted and messy and the marshmallows did melt finally. The finish product was enjoyed by the harshest of critics.
The messy details: I found the instructions for the oven at Great Green Science Projects for Kids. If I were to do this again, I would get an oven thermometer to find out exactly how hot the oven gets, I might also try to find another type of oven that maybe has a lid to keep the heat in more. All-in-all a great project for my kiddos and good tool for discussions about different ways we can use the sun for energy.
