Predict-o-Meter — What Will Happen If…?

A quick-fire “kitchen counter show” of tiny safe actions, where the child calls the result before each one happens and explains why afterwards.

  1. Line up 5–6 mini-demos using things already in the kitchen. Good ones:

    • let go of an inflated, untied balloon
    • drop a flat sheet of paper and a scrunched-up one together
    • stir a spoonful of salt into warm water
    • tip a cup of water onto a dry sponge sitting on a plate
    • blow across the top of a strip of paper held under your lip
    • put an ice cube on a warm plate and one on a cold plate

  2. Before each one, describe exactly what you are about to do and ask: “What will happen if I…?” Wait for a real answer — a guess is fine.

  3. Do it. Watch together without talking for a moment.

  4. Ask: “What happened? Was that what you thought? Why do you think it did that?” Accept the child’s own explanation and add one plain sentence of your own if useful (“The air rushed out, so it pushed the balloon the other way”).

  5. Let the child choose one demo to do again with one change (“What if we blow the balloon up only a little?”) and predict again.

Variation: the child becomes the showman — they pick an action and you predict, sometimes wrongly, so they can enjoy correcting you with a “because.”

Requirements

  • Space: Kitchen counter or table
  • Surface: A wipeable surface; a tray helps with spills
  • Materials: Balloon, 2 sheets of paper, salt, cup of warm water, spoon, dry sponge, plate, ice cubes
  • Participants: 1 adult + 1 child; works well with 2–3 children taking turns to predict
  • Supervision: Close — the adult sets up and handles the balloon and warm water

Rationale & Objective

Predicting the outcome of a specific action is one of this subdomain’s core skills and a named goal in Head Start ELOF’s Scientific Reasoning (“asks a question, gathers information, and makes predictions”) and in HighScope’s predicting indicator. Committing to a guess first is what makes the result informative: a prediction that fails creates the surprise that drives children to look for a cause. Legare (2012) showed that when preschoolers explain an outcome that didn’t fit their expectation, their next exploration becomes more like hypothesis testing. Bullock & Gelman (1979) established that even 3–5-year-olds assume causes come before effects; this game stretches that into saying what the cause was. The “change one thing and try again” step matches the NGSS kindergarten idea that simple tests can be designed to gather evidence about causes.

Progress Indicators

  • Early: reluctant to guess or says “I don’t know”; describes what happened afterwards (“it flew!”) but gives no reason
  • Developing: makes a guess for familiar actions; afterwards links one action to one result (“you let go, so it went”); says whether the guess was right
  • Proficient: predicts correctly for most familiar demos and gives a plausible reason using “because” or “so”; is interested, not upset, when a prediction is wrong
  • Advanced: proposes own “what if” changes and predicts how the result will differ; uses an earlier demo to explain a new one (“the scrunched one is like a ball, so it’ll fall fast”)

Safety Notes

  • Balloons are a serious choking hazard, inflated or burst — the adult inflates and holds them, and all pieces go in the bin straight away; avoid latex if anyone has a latex allergy
  • Use warm, not hot, water — comfortable to dip a finger in
  • Wipe up spills at once; wet kitchen floors are slippery
  • Do not include heat sources, sharp tools or anything the child might later try alone with risk — choose only demos that are safe to repeat unsupervised
  • Children who dislike being wrong may stop guessing; model cheerful wrong guesses yourself

Hints

  • Playfulness: draw a “Predict-o-Meter” dial on paper and let the child move a clothes-peg pointer to “I’m sure,” “maybe,” or “no idea” before each demo
  • Sustain interest: keep a jar of new “what if” slips — rolling a tin versus a box, a magnet near the fridge, a damp cloth in the freezer overnight. Three or four per session is plenty
  • Common mistake: explaining the science at length. One short cause sentence is enough; the habit of predicting and asking why matters more than the correct physics
  • Limited space: play it with no materials during daily life — “What will happen if I let go of this door? If we leave the bread out all night?”
  • Cross-domain: tally right and wrong guesses with marks (numeracy); draw before-and-after pictures (early writing); practise “if… then…” sentences (language)
  • Progression: familiar actions with obvious results → actions with a surprising result → change one thing and predict the difference → child designs the demo and predicts

Sources

  • Head Start ELOF — Scientific Reasoning (asks a question, gathers information, and makes predictions; plans and conducts investigations)
  • HighScope Science & Technology KDIs — Predicting, Experimenting, Drawing conclusions
  • Legare, C.H. (2012), “Exploring explanation: Explaining inconsistent evidence informs exploratory, hypothesis-testing behavior in young children,” Child Development, 83(1), 173–185
  • Bullock, M. & Gelman, R. (1979), “Preschool children’s assumptions about cause and effect: Temporal ordering,” Child Development, 50(1)
  • NGSS Kindergarten — crosscutting concept Cause and Effect (“simple tests can be designed to gather evidence to support or refute student ideas about causes”)
  • Piaget, J. (1930), The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality