During her trip, we had 3 days dedicated to science. And we did almost 20 experiments during her visit. Here is our first batch:
1. So right off the bat, my mom put 2 eggs into vinegar. Throughout her visit our kids enjoyed seeing the
eggshells dissolve and seeing how the eggs shrank in corn syrup. Our kids also enjoyed holding the eggs in their hands and clearly seeing the yolks inside. Somehow both eggs survived the experiment and didn't break.
2. We started off "science week" with a very simple experiment, alka-seltzer in colored water and oil. I bought a large box of alka-seltzer because this experiment is very easy to repeat over and over again. We enjoyed seeing the colorful water bubble up in test tubes like a lava lamp. We also used a vase to make a "huge test tube" just for fun.
3. After the Alka-seltzer experiment we played around with oil and colored water not mixing. We filled 2 small clear containers with oil and gave each of our kids a pipette and let them add colored water to the oil. It was a nice filler activity when we needed some time to clean up and prepare for the next experiments.
4. I remember using yarn and salt to pick up ice cubes as a kid. While this experiment wasn't as easy as I remember, our kids enjoyed it once we got into a rhythm and figured out how much salt to pour onto the ice cubes and how long to wait before lifting up the yarn. Using a lot of salt and only waiting a couple seconds worked best for us.
5. Our next experiment was a demonstration. We were interested in whether a flame would pop a water balloon. My mom told our kids about how she used to demonstrate this to her students by first holding a regular balloon filled with air over a bunsen burner. Not surprisingly, it popped. Then she would fill a balloon with water and put on her raincoat. The students expected the water balloon to also pop, but when she held it over the bunsen burner, nothing happened. Our demonstration wasn't quite as dramatic (no bunsen burner, popped balloon or raincoat), but it was still fun to see that the
water prevented the balloon from popping.
6. Fingerprint detectives. We used a charcoal stick and scotch tape to get all of our finger prints onto a sheet of paper. Afterwards I took each of our thumb prints again and asked our kids to figure out which thumb print was which. I tried to make this experiment a bit more challenging by making all of the prints roughly the same size (as grandma's actual thumb print is quite a bit larger than our 3 year olds). It wasn't easy, but grandma and our son were able to solve the puzzle on their first try.
We hope you enjoy these experiments as much as we did.
