Oh--I had another idea. I totally understand what you mean about your DS and DH, by the way. DD is very much like your DH, it sounds... and our entire household operates a lot like that, in fact. We all do a million things, most of them frighteningly well with impossibly short learning curves.
Anyway-- my idea is to hunt down some "science fair experiments for pennies" books. I have a few of these that I picked up on clearance tables over the years. Now, the reason that I love them is that they tend to be aimed squarely at the demographic/needs of MG kids in grades 2-7, thereabouts. The dexterity expectations and safety level are about right, mostly it's household items (nothing special or arcane, mostly), and a LOT of it actually works the way it is supposed to.
But what is even BETTER is that there are usually blurbs explaining the "why" of it briefly, but then where the real action is for PG elementary kids is in figuring out how to set it up to TEST the "explanation" as a hypothesis... and how to tweak the set-up on those that do not work as advertised/instructed.
We've gotten a LOT of mileage out of those books.
I will try this out too. Though we have done some experiments, we haven't done what you have suggested regarding testing the "explanation". Fortunately I have a superb used bookstore near me. Thanks so much HK!
