Letting the Children Play With Fire

In his book Fifty Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do, Gever Tully suggests we let them play with fire. This may seem to go against many parents better judgment but so are a lot of other things in his book. Here is a link to Gever Tully speaking on the subject.
Gever Tulley 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do | Video on TED.com

So this week we played with fire. I realize that this may not be the spectacular fire that Tully was imagining, but it was exciting for the children just the same. The girls learned that fire needs heat, fuel, and air to burn, so we experimented with what happened when we removed those elements. Denying heat was the first and least exciting experiment. A match, with out the benefit of friction against the strip does nothing at all, the children observed. After that things got more interesting. We lit the match, gave it fuel (the candle) then denied it air. The children watched in amazement as the flame slowly dwindled and died.

Next we tried different ways to put out the fire. The girls used droppers of water, sprinkles of baking soda, and blowing to put it out. After the fire was out they played happily in the wet wax.

I think we may have to try to work our way through the book. It is full of activities for children that we would have never thought of, and many that I have been wanting to try for a long time.

I linked this post with...