Super Science Experiments

Our Family time this week was spent on Monday morning doing some fun science experiments.

The first one we did involved mentos and diet coke. I had never done it before but yesterday our Pastor used it as part of his illustration for his sermon. It is way cool!!! Drop the mentos in and back up!

The rest of our experiment all focused on water and oceans (We did the coke and mentos just because the kids were begging to do it at home after seeing it at church. So I told them if they work together to clean up all the dog poop in the back yard we could do it. )

So our first experiment was all about floating and sinking. I made up a worksheet with pictures of different objects such as pencil, screw, key, shell, string, etc and they first had to guess if it would float or sink and then we actually tested each item. Then with Anastasia we got into the discussion of density and how salt water affects things and such.

We used an egg and measured how much salt we needed to add to the water to get it to float.

Our other lesson was showing a visual of how much ocean water, drinking water and land there is on earth. We used a two liter coke bottle and filled it just to the curve of the bottle with water and added blue food coloring. The bottle represents the earth, the water represents ocean water. Then we measured and added corn oil. The kids got to see how water and oil don't mix and that led to a bunch of discussions. The oil represents drinking water then the left over space at the top of the bottle represents land. They got the concept and understood but their favorite thing to do was to shake the bottle as hard as they could and then watch the oil and water seperate again.

This was school for the day. Anastasia had to write a paragraph about what she learned and Joshua dictated 3 sentences and then recopied them on his own.