So tonight Adelaide got to have a little screen time after dinner while I was doing the dishes. She has spent enough time on the internet to have a few sites she likes, and lately it's been some fun one with math puzzles and games that require some very basic physics. I came in to check on her after a few minutes and discovered that she was on a site claiming to be "Girl Games," and she was on the game
Jennifer Rose: Babysitter in Love.
As you can imagine, this immediately looked like a bad idea to me. Here is the written description from the site:
Jennifer Rose: Babysitter in Love - Jenny Rose loves children very much and she works as a babysitter now. Your task is to help Jenny to take care about kids, satisfy their wishes and needs, also you need to give some time to Jennifer's boyfriend who comes to visit her with flowers. But don't forget about the children while flirting with the boyfriend. To start the game you need take the kid from the door, sit the child down on the carpet on free space, wait for the child's wishes and give the kids what they want. Use upgrades to buy new clothes, shoes and toys to increase children patience. And don't forget about the boyfriend. Jenny have to flirt with him when he comes. You've got only 5 lives for the whole game.
Um, not sure I want my child learning she "have to flirt" with the boyfriend when he comes. Nor that she should be buying new clothes, shoes and toys to "increase children patience." But when I asked her where she found out about this site, she got a bit evasive and I decided I'd be better off just sitting with her and watching the game instead of making it all the more appealing by immediately shutting it down. As I watched, I saw that the appeal for her was moving the babysitter around and getting the kids changed, put to bed, and fed, and that she didn't seem to view the boyfriend at the door as anything more than another task to get to in time before she lost points. So I let her play and I assume she will lose interest when there's not more to it. I'm glad that her natural inkling is to play things that hold her interest by challenging her problem-solving skills, but I suspect that as she spends time with other kids who are online without a parent's critical eye there will be more websites she knows about that I would prefer she didn't. It's not too soon to be putting things in place to try to help her navigate through all the crap she is going to encounter out there.
Adelaide received a science kit from her aunt and uncle for Christmas, which sparked a renewed interest in conducting experiments. First, she set up her lab in her room and did several experiments, some from the book in the kit and some with materials we had set aside for her earlier.
Next we set up for a two-part experiment designed to teach about the effect of additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We read about greenhouse gasses, where they come from and what they do to the ozone layer and earth's temperature.
Adelaide logged the temperature in our mini ecosystem under the "sun."
Next, we were ready to make our CO2.
We took the CO2 we created and used a straw to put it into the container. It is heavier than air, so it sank to the bottom where it proceeded to heat up the temperature in the container over the course of several minutes.
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