Summer of Science: Rock Candy

So far, this experiment, making rock candy, is my daughter's favourite. It took a lot of patience but when it was finished (it took one week) she was rewarded with candy that she (well, we) had made ourselves. Rock candy is beautiful to look at, and you can make it with plain sugar or you can add food colour and flavour extract. I let my little scientist pick, and she chose banana extract (that's a thing, believe it or not, that you can find with other extracts in the baking department) and yellow food dye.

You'll need a clean jar, a medium to large sized saucepan, a straw or chopstick (or other stick-like thing), a pipe cleaner, sugar and water. You will also need another clean jar or drinking glass, because you have to change the sugar water mixture daily for at least the first three days.

What you do is combine three cups of white sugar with one cup of water (you will not be eating three cups of sugar; in the end you pitch quite a lot of it). You stir it constantly over medium high heat until it boils. Take it off the heat and keep stirring until the sugar is nicely dissolved. Then you add your colour and extract, if you're using it, and pour the mixture into a clean jar. Wrap a pipe cleaner around the straw or chopstick or whatever you're using, until it dangles down to nearly the bottom but not quite of the jar. You want to balance the straw on the top of the jar. It should look like this:

I realize that this is not an appealing colour. Moving on.

You will need to put a paper towel over top to keep dust out but still allow water to evaporate.

Right after we did this, I asked Jr. Scientist to draw a picture of what she thought the crystals would look like. She thought they would look quite different than they really looked like, so that was kind of fun to find out.

The next day, or even later on in the day, you will need to scoop the crystals off the top so the water can still escape. Every day for at least the first three days you will need to transfer the mixture to a new container, because you want the crystals to attach to the pipe cleaner, not the sides and bottom of the container. You also need to allow the water to evaporate, as I mentioned, and it's difficult to do that when you've got a sheet of crystals at the top. By the fourth day, we just let it sit in the the jar until it was ready.

One week later, or when you decide it's ready, you should put the candy on a plate to let it dry for at least two hours. Then it's ready to eat. It was surprisingly delicious. I made a small rock candy on a little skewer to see if it would stick as well to a smooth surface (it doesn't) and I ate that. It was like a marshmallow banana in flavour. Not bad. Definitely edible. My kid loved it. I think we'll try orange next time.

This is the finished product in all it's very yellow glory.

Summer of Science: Snow

My daughter had a friend over the other day and we taught him how to geocache. He wasn't particularly impressed but he did mention that one of his favourite things in the world is snow. "Snow is so much fun." I remembered seeing an experiment in an old book that made a sort of snow-type concoction that kids could throw like a snowball. We went home and looked it up. I had all of the ingredients, because there were just two. Chances are, you've got them, too.

To make "snow" you need a cup and a half of baking soda, and you need about a half a cup of hair conditioner. That's it. You put it in a bowl, mix it up, and send the kids outside with it with the instructions to not throw at each other. They were happy to make snowballs and throw it at the wall, and it was super easy to clean up with a hose. It also smelled very, very nice. So there. Snow. In June.

      
See how it falls like snow on the dirt? It actually looks like it's real until you wash it away.

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.