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!!