team effort

Bare Hand In Ice Water

With Blubber

The blubber was Crisco. I was trying to show the kids how a layer of blubber keeps arctic mammals warm in icy water.

Then I forced Tee to look up the word insulation in the dictionary, and we did an experiment with glasses of boiling water, to see what kind of material around the house would keep the water hot the longest. Of these materials: towel, tinfoil, leather, and winter jacket, the winter jacket won. Phew! I can just imagine how these two would look wearing tin foil all winter.

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This is the most crystallized of them all. I don’t think we put enough Borax into solution.

As for the sugar crystals, nothing is happening at all, and we put a TON of sugar into the water. Might be time to do a little internet research.

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Inspired by Angie, we did the Borax snowflake project, and then, while the Borax was out, I remembered about Flubber. A tad messy, but well worth it, because I was rewarded with squeals of excitement and even a “You’re the best mother ever!” I laughed, and reminded Tee that he doesn’t think I’m so great when it’s house cleaning day, so he amended his statement. “I mean, you’re the best science mother ever!” I’m okay with that.

In case you don’t already know, here’s the Flubber How-To:

Mix  1/3 cup warm water, food coloring(optional), and 1/2 cup white glue. (Yet another use for my industrial size jug of glue.) I used a cleaned out yogurt container for the mixing.

Mix 1 tsp of Borax with 1/3 cup of warm water inside a small ziploc bag.

Add the glue mixture to the Borax mixture in the bag, seal, and knead until solid(ish).

Done! It will be a bit wet, but take it out of the bag and it will dry off quickly. Store in a clean ziploc bag.

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Still on the science kick.

Today it was the not-so-well-known Cartesian Divers experiment. Well, not so well known to me anyway. Something to do with density, and air pressure, easy enough to do but hard to explain. Tee found it absolutely riveting. He wrote a whole paragraph explaining the experiment in detail, drew a labeled diagram, and then went off to create “an irrigation system” out of the used pipette ends.

Next science project: make a magnifying “glass” using water and a clear container. While we were sticking our fingers in the water to fill up the pipettes, they noticed that our fingers looked huge through the sides of the water filled glass. Which led to questions, and garbled answers, and more questions….thank goodness for a postgraduate degree in science….and Google.

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Another classic. The Rubber Egg Experiment.

Put a raw egg in a glass of ½ vinegar/½ water. Wait at least 48 hours. Watch the egg develop bubbles on it’s surface. Watch the bubbles lift the egg to the surface of the liquid. Talk some more about gas vs liquid vs solid. Maybe talk about hot air balloons. Helium balloons.

Then take the egg out, and see what happens.

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Homeschool science is fun in the early years. At least, I think so. There are so many great books in the kids section of the library, and so many great sites on the internet. I have stacks of books sitting around the house all earmarked and sticky-tabbed at pages for fun experiments and projects.

Today’s science investigation was Identify The White Powder. No, not what you may be thinking. Four white substances from the kitchen (flour, baking soda, salt, and sugar), a magnifying glass, some water, and some vinegar. No tasting allowed. Or sniffing.

The actual identification was quite easy for the kids, but that didn’t seem to bother them. They gabbled on about why and how and how else and look what happens when and see, I added water and it turned to glue, just what I suspected and how come the salt crystals aren’t as shiny as the sugar crystals, and then the talk turned to the acetic acid/bicarbonate reaction, which naturally lead to the discussion of the properties of a gas, and the three phases of matter, and of course atoms and atomic theory, and isn’t it cool how dry ice sublimates at room temperature?

All of the talk about gases gave Tee the idea to put a balloon over a bottle to see if we could capture the CO2 from the baking soda and vinegar combination.  Look at their faces! I think they were expecting Chernobyl.

I was, of course, lumped with the cleanup, as they went on to discover more properties of balloons play, but I didn’t mind. My little contribution to science.

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