The first time I got my girls a chemistry set brings back lots of memories and lots of laughs. If we had only known!
I think of Jim Carey in, "The Pet Detective", and if you've seen this movie, you'll remember there were animals of every size and type, free - grazing in his apartment! If you're like the pet detective, and have a dog, cats, fish, scorpions, birds and various reptiles free-grazing in your home, and want to give your children the experience of exploring chemistry in that same home, you've got challenges to face!
On the other hand, if you're like lots of families and have no other animals living in your home besides you, your mate and your offspring, then you only have simple human considerations to organize, I'll be going over these shortly, so that you and your children can arrange the most awesome lab chemistry set experience place in your home.
Meanwhile, just image that your pet iguana and three cats have discovered your carefully arranged lab for your children, and see it as a vast playground for fun and decide to go wild!
This is exactly what happened to us! It was mayhem! Everything got wrecked and it was hilarious. Until we had to clean up the mess! But we learned the hard way, and our new lab is growing more exciting every day.
So whether you've got other animals living in your house besides you or not, here are some practical strategies for setting up a home lab for chemistry sets, so that it becomes a refuge of excitement and discovery for you and your kids, and Charlie, your Horny Toed Lizard from Hell, never gets whiff of it!
Once you've decided on a place for your in-home chemistry set lab, control it. A door usually works. A door that locks, is even better, and can stop not only all of your animal friends, but even those precocious 2 to 5 year olds of yours, who just can't stop messing with things.
When setting up a lab for your on-going chemistry experiments, you must make sure you have all the common sense considerations dialed in for optimum enjoyment: think of it as providing a place for on-going cooking projects that can take a week to complete.
Set up a tiny corner of any room you can control and provide a work station like a table, counter, or old office desk where you can help your children set up their lab.
Make sure it provides all the working surface area to set up a lab that is clean, organized, and well-lit. Take measures to provide for adequate ventilation where steady air flow can be maximized with an open door, or window, or both when you are working in your lab. Finally, make sure any lab you set up in your home has easy access to a bathroom or a kitchen sink with hot and cold running water for the preparation, cleaning and sterilizing procedures you and children will have to work through to complete any given experiment you decide to undertake.
With pets or not, any home can use these simple, common sense strategies to arrange a productive lab area for the chemistry set of your choice, to produce the amazing and exciting results that you and your children were hoping for!