Egg Crystals

Egg Crystals

This is quite a nice little experiment and reminds me of things I used to do as a child.  Its a nice comparison test.

First of all you clean out 6 half eggshells.

You need the following:

Bicarbonate of Soda

Salt

sugar

water

food colourings:

You mix a cup bicarbonate of soda with a cup of water and add a few drops of colour, then do the same with the other ingredients.

We then poured the mixtures into the shells. In our experiment, blue is sugar and water, red/purple is salt and water and orange is bicarbonate of soda and water:

You then need to leave it for at least a week.  This next picture is a week after and you can see there are some crystals forming in the bicarbonate of soda and some in the salt, but the sugar is still completely liquid:

This is then probably a month later and there are definite crystals in the bicarbonate of soda shell (and a fly!):

And some quite solid crystals in the salt shell:

The sugar was still liquid one month later!

We then intended to finish the experiment and throw it away, however nothing gets thrown away here so here are the 3 shells 2.5 months later.  The salt is pretty amazing:

 The Bicarbonate of soda also looks very pretty (although no longer orange!):

By this time, the sugar has also crystallised! You can't see it very well but the liquid has totally turned to solid crystal.

I think the salt is definitely the best, but it was interesting to see all the differences along the way. I think I will go and throw them away now!

If you have made it all the way down this far, as always Thank you!

Lego Maze

Lego and Marbles

Well, this is my first blog post in months, and I am just surfacing after a pretty hectic Summer! We are still living with my parents and most of our belongings are in storage, but its all working out ok!

I thought I would try and catch up on things we have done over the Summer, and why not start with two of our favourite things - Marbles and Lego!

We decided to make a Lego Maze. Its such a simple idea, you just need some lego bricks - any size work - a lego base plate, again any size, a marble, and some imagination!

You can make them as intricate or as simple as you like. Olly took the plain route which was very effective:

 Thomas took the more elaborate route, and had doors to go through and obstacles to jump over! Both were great fun and actually played with for many days..

As always if you have got this far, thank you! Look out for the next post on Egg Crystals!!

Rain Clouds

More Science..

Yet another request for science, but this time I found a new idea - home made rain clouds.

You fill a glass of water three quarters full and then top it up with saving foam:

Then you carefully squirt blue water into the cloud. Things do not always go to plan and I think Olly squirted too much in too quickly!

This of course then turned into the usual exercise of squirting and mixing!! I am not complaining of course as it is all good fun really and very easy to clean up as just soap and water:

I then decided to have a go myself and basically once the "cloud" is full if you have added the"rain" very carefully, the "rain" starts to fall out the bottom:

It was quite cool.....

I do have to regularly remind myself that I am doing these things for the children not for me ;)

Thanks as always for getting to the end!

Investigative Destruction

Delicate Distruction 

As is often the case, I found this idea somewhere and cannot take the credit for it! 

In light of us moving we have had to go through, not only all our things in the loft but also all my parents things (we are moving in with my parents - that could be a whole different blogging sensation!!) and in doing so have identified a number (take that to be at least a full estate car full!) of old electrical items so it was an ideal opportunity to do this activity! 

Having selected 2 pieces - and old CD player and a broken DVD player, I laid them on the table with a selection of screw drivers and I let the boys in....

They were so excited at the prospect of being allowed to destroy things and set to work straight away. They did need a little help taking the cover off, but their faces when they saw what was inside were amazing, I haven't captured it well - they we literally speechless at the circuit boards etc:

They both then just slowly unscrewed things, Thomas in a very methodical way, Olly not so! 

After about 20 minutes, Olly was bored of trying to be delicate in the destruction process and just wanted a hammer! Thomas on the other hand just kept unscrewing for about an hour:

                   

It was fun seeing how the CD got spun around and pulled in and out.

He got down to the tiniest screws and springs:

Olly had his wish and was eventually given a hammer:

Job done!!

This is definitely something I will let them do again before I next throw something away.

We have now moved and I have already found a few items that we will be unscrewing today including a laptop and phone...

Thank you so much for reading, please leave a comment....

Science afternoon

Science Lab in a Tray!

Olly LOVES science and the other day he wanted to be a scientist so I set up a tray that was sure to get things fizzing!

There were 3 bowls of baking soda with some colour in, 1 bowl shaving foam mixed with baking soda and one bowl of citric acid mixed with baking soda), some spoons, a syringe, a bottle of vinegar and some water:

And away he went first mixing to make the colour appear:

Then adding vinegar to see the magic:

The shaving foam was pretty impressive:

But the citric acid won hands down - not only because it didn't smell of vinegar (you add water to citric acid) This one just kept on fizzing and fizzing....

Of course it was all going very nicely and then I decided to let him get on with it - he will play with this sort of things for ages - in this case about 40 mins and the result is:

We all love baking soda experiments and I always have a few wholesale tubs around to bring out when needed! Its the smell of vinegar that gets too much!!

Thank you for reading...

Bouncy Egg

How to Make and Egg Bounce!

Another request for science, but this time we didn't have time to mix and squirt and fizz. I'd seen this experiment ages ago on the internet but Olly found it in his science book. 

First we filled one glass with the dreaded vinegar (honestly my house constantly smells of the stuff!), and one glass with water. Then we dropped a raw egg into each:

Instantly you can notice a difference - the vinegar is on the left.

After a couple of house we noticed the shell literally shredding:

Now this is the boring bit - you need to leave it for 7 days!! Luckily we were going away for 4 so that wasn't to hard. Every day we were there we felt it and it was getting softer and softer.

Then on day 7 when we got home this is what we found:

It was really rubbery and squidgy.  So next came the test. You do need to be gentle, but it does actually bounce - even I was amazed!

Then as with all things in my house distruction becomes the goal! It didn't take very long, but a harder, higher drop and SPLAT!

It was funny how the egg inside was still a runny, messy, raw egg (smelling of vinegar!), but the shell was like plastic!

The Science Bit

The vinegar, which is an acid, reacts with the calcium carbonate  of the eggshell. The change makes the shell go soft then disappear. Its called decalcification.

You can apparently try this with a clean chicken bone as well which should turn so rubbery that you could tie it in a knot!

As always thank you for getting this far!

Stretchy Play dough

Stretchy Fun

If you like tactile things then this really is for you! And it is (like most the things I do soooo easy!)

You need two ingredients - Cornflour and Hair conditioner (I bought a really cheap non branded economy one!)

Mix equal quantities and then kneed until it all starts coming together and you are done!

You might want to add some colour - we didn't!

It smells lovely (depending on the conditioner!) 

Its pretty amazing stuff - you can stretch it for ever, but if you pull quickly it will snap!

Happy Stretching....