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Kitchen Science: Water Week 2

Happy Thursday!

Here are the experiments we shared with our park play group last week…building on last week’s fun and trying on some new elements for the Sweet Peas to ponder: Sink+Float, Taking Up Space, and Melting Point.

Our inspiration for these posts is this book by Usborne Books:

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The mojority of the activities in the book can be done with things mosts of us keep around the house.

Experiment 1
Will ice float in water?
This is a great follow-up to last week’s sink and float experiment. When a Sweet Pea reasons it out, it would seem that something heavy like ice should sink…surprise!! It floats!

One interesting correlation to explain is perfectly demonstrated in the winter. If ice was heavier as a solid, bodies of water would freeze from the bottom up, effectively freezing out all life every winter.  By floating, it creates a layer of insulation for the life below, that continues to swim freely throughout the winter months.
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Experiment 2
Taking Up Space
Fill a container with water and put on the lid. Place it in the freezer and see what happens!  This experiment helps to illustrate the idea in experiment above.  Freezing water takes up more space because the molecules spread out, hence making it light enough to float in water.

As you can see in our experiment, it did not pop up the lid as much as we had hoped, it did however bump out the bottom of our container and created a very visible difference the Sweet Peas noticed right away.

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Experiment 3
Melting Ice
Prepare three containers: one with warm water, one with cool water, and one empty container.  Have your Sweet Peas guess what will happen to the ice they put into each container.

Careful with this one that the warm water isn’t too hot if they splash it onto the counter or on themselves.

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Experiment 4
Melting Without Heating – Salt
Sprinkle and ice cube with salt…compare it with a plain ice cube.  When the salt mixes with the ice, it lowers the freezing temperature. This salty ice will melt because it now requires a colder temperature to make it freeze.

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Experiment 5
Melting Without Heating – Pressure
Press a spoon into the ice.  You will see the ice melt underneath the area of pressure…if you look closely in the picture you can see the spoon-shaped divot in the ice because ice always melts when it is pressed.

Ask your sweet peas how this would affect their ability to walk on ice.  If they said it would be slippery, then they are correct! When we walk on ice, a thin layer of water forms between our shoe or boot and the patch of ice. This layer of water makes it hard for the soles of our shoe to grip the ground, so in effect Mother Nature is creating her own slip and slide!

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That is it for today’s installment of Kitchen Science.  Enjoy trying these out with your Sweet Pea at home.  Leave me a comment and let me know how it goes for you and your crew!

Kitchen Science – Water Play I

Welcome to our new series…Kitchen Science!!

Instead of doing “preschool playdates” with our SPB students, we decided to do park playdates so that more families could feel like they were welcome to join us.  The home educator in me has a hard time offering no activity for the children to explore while they share time with us…so I started bringing kitchen science experiments to the park with us.

I am calling this series “Kitchen Science” because most of the activities we will be doing use household items, and all the exploring can be done on your kitchen counter.  Join us over the next few weeks as we share the activities we are enjoying with SPB friends of all ages!

The inspiration for all these activities is this book:

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We received it as part of the Sonlight Homeschool Curriculum that we use.

One of the first concepts we teach children about water is “sink” and “float”.  We used that vocabulary throughout all the water play.

WHICH ONE FLOATS BEST?

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This activity is to help the children explore the idea that some things are going to distribute weight differently than others.  When it’s dry, the basket would hold more things…this is what happened when we added water:

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There are lots of ways to add skills to this activity…

Level 1: Gross motor skills ~ place the glass beads in by the handful

Level 2: Fine motor skills ~ place the glass beads one-by-one into the containers

Level 3: Count the beads as they go in

Level 4: Science Journal ~ note how much each container held, and at which point it sunk to the bottom.

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We like these picture journals from Miller Pads and Paper.
The Sweet Peas can draw a picture to remind them of their experiment,
and also write notes or dictate notes to the parent.

You may have noticed the green lines on the side of the tub…we drew those to measure the starting and ending point of the food tray and the blue rectangular container.  After we emptied the water, the children could measure the difference between the change of the containers in the water.

BLUE CONTAINER

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MEAT TRAY

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Here is another variation on the theme using two metal containers.  I asked the children to guess which one would float.  Some said neither since they were both metal…they got a surprise, and also an “aha” moment when we talked about how giant ships made of metal can sail in the ocean.

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The solid container floated…the enjoyed watching the sieve gurgle bubbles and sink.
You might also fill the solid container with beads to see what it’s sinking point was.

DISTRIBUTION OF WEIGHT

Next we explored what would happen if the cargo on our “ships” was evenly distributed or one-sided.  We don’t buy plastic egg cartons so I had to improvise with a cardboard carton and some plastic wrap. For this activity we used 24 glass beads.

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For comparison on this activity, you could draw lines to measure the change in angle of the containers, and then measure the angles with a protractor after the water was drained.

AIR PRESSURE

Blowing bubbles!! This activity demonstrated what would happen if you forced air into a submerged container.  I added two glass beads to our container to better demonstrate the effect of air on an objects ability to sink or float.

We connected this experiment back to the metal containers that float. Showing how air adds buoyancy to an object, we talked about how ships and submarines use ballast to sink or float in the water.

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So those are three experiments you can do at home with household objects…I would love to hear how your Sweet Pea enjoyed them!