The Dropping Game

So when you drop things in a vacuum, everything falls at the same rate.  Since no one actually lives in a vacuum, though, I thought it might be fun to let my daughter experiment with dropping things and seeing what falls fastest.  We have some stairs with a railing, and we went part of the way up with 2 items at a time - like, a book and a wadded up piece of paper; a wadded up piece of paper and a flat sheet of paper; 2 balloons of different sizes; etc.  We asked, "Which will fall faster?" and then we'd drop them and see.  By the end, she was able to predict that smaller balloons fall faster than bigger balloons, which I thought was actually quite impressive.