Summer of Science: Lesson One

This year, school ended very early for the summer. In fact, it ended a few weeks early, because there is a strike. Now, our summer plans are never complicated. We have friends over, we go away for a couple of days here and there, there is a week long day camp or some such thing somewhere in the middle, and we go to parks. That's pretty much it. I start off loving summer vacation; I only have one kid, and she is an enjoyable little person full of quirky awesomeness and a lot of energy. But by the end of it, she is ready to head back to school because it's one of her favourite places to be, and I am ready to send her back because she makes it obvious that she is ready to go back by whining and testing my ever-dwindling patience. The fact that we had a few extra weeks tacked on to summer vacation made me pause. We needed something different this year, and she loves to learn, so we came up with Summer of Science. For real, we're going to do some cool stuff.

The first experiment we did was the good old ivory soap in the microwave experiment. It was a quick experiment. We bought a bar of Ivory soap. We cut it in half because I was told it would get very big. We put it on a plate. We microwaved it on high for 90 seconds. I asked my child what she thought would happen to the soap. She thought it would melt. It does not melt. It expands and gets crazy big. After it cools, it's pretty much just fluffy Ivory soap. You can't do a ton with it, but you can make potions with it, break it in to bits, etc. You could also use it as regular soap, because it will still clean. It's just really big. And flaky. You can't really play with it like clay, like I thought we could. At any rate, it's a cool experiment and your microwave will smell really, really squeaky clean.

FYI: It has to be Ivory soap. It is whipped with air, and it expands in a way that is similar to a popcorn kernel. So. If you know of another air whipped soap then maybe you can try that. As far as I know, it needs to be good ol' Ivory soap.

                                             

                                                 Behold: THE MAGIC OF SCIENCE.