Science Play | learning 4 kids

Science Fun – Dancing Sultanas

Posted by Janice on January 16, 2013 3 Comments

What will happen if we placed sultanas into a glass of soda water? Watch and be amazed!!!

Dancing Sultanas is a super easy and fun science activity for kids! It is so simple to set up and only requires basic materials.

What you will need?

You will need a glass of soda water (sparkling fizzy water), about five sultanas and food colouring is optional.

Let’s Play

We poured some soda water into a small glass bottle and dropped the sultanas into the fizzy liquid. The colouring is optional.

Let’s Learn

The soda in the water creates the fizz and bubbles. Soon the bubbles start to pick up the sultanas and carry them to the top of the glass. As the bubbles pop at the top of the liquid, the sultanas go back to the bottom of the glass and the pattern repeats again.

We also placed some sultanas into a glass of plain tap water to see what would happen. They just sank straight to the bottom of the glass. My kids did noticed that there we some small bubbles on the sultanas but not enough to make them dance, float to the top of the glass.

Learning Opportunities

Using descriptive words to express ideas and opinions.
Make connections with real life experiences.
Promote scientific thinking – predictions, observations, comparison, reasoning, data gathering, experimentation and evaluation.
Cause and Effect

Find more Science Activities…..

How to make Hanging Crystals?

Ice Boats – Floating and Sinking

Filed Under: Science Play | Tagged:

How to Make Hanging Crystals?

Posted by Janice on October 5, 2012 12 Comments

Growing Hanging Crystals is a great science activity for kids to explore!

During the school holidays we took our girls to see a cave. It was an amazing experience for them and aroused so much curiosity and questions.

I believe in embracing their interests and curiosity and exploring them further.

The stalactites, stalagmites and crystals (calcium sculptures) inside the cave were amazing and the girls were completely in ore of this. These stalactites and stalagmites are formed by water dripping or flowing from fractures on the roof of the cave. To try and imitate this we set up an experiment to grow salt crystals hanging from a string of wool.

What you will need?

You will need two jars, a string of wool, water, two paper clips, small plate and bi-carbonate soda. We also set up a table to write our observations down each day for 1 week.

Fill two jars with hot water. Stir in about six teaspoons of bicarbonate soda, until no more will dissolve. When a layer forms at the bottom of the jars, this means no more will dissolve. This was fun to watch as the water fizzed and bubbles formed in the jar, a bit like opening a bottle of soft drink.
Tie a paper clip to each end of the piece of wool and place each end in each jar.
Leave the jars for a week. Crystals will grow along the wool and hang down over the place.

What is Happening?

The wool soaks up the mixture. When the water evaporates, all that is left are the bicarbonate soda crystals (Salt). The hanging crystals are formed when the mixture starts to drip from the wool and evaporate. If you’re lucky, you might even get crystals that drip onto the plate and form columns…..like in caves.

Learning Experience from this activity:

Using descriptive words to express ideas and opinions.
Make connections with real life experiences.
Promote scientific thinking – predictions, observations, comparison, reasoning, data gathering, experimentation and evaluation.

Filed Under: Science Play | Tagged:

Milk Numbers

Posted by Janice on June 28, 2012 2 Comments

These milk numbers shown in the photo are made using milk and vinegar. Mixing milk and vinegar together is an interesting science experiment to try with the kids with some very surprising results – read below to find out how…….it is so cool!

Not only is this activity a great science experiment, it is also a fun sensory experience for the kids!

Please note:

This activity requires parent supervision, particularly when cooking on the stove.
The number shapes require about 2 days to completely dry and harden. The
Number shapes are not edible!

What you will need?

You will need 2 cups of milk (due to expire soon), small bowl, strainer, chux dish cloth, small saucepan, measuring spoons, tray lined with baking paper, food colouring, 4 tablespoons of vinegar, straw and cookie cutters, we have used numbers cutters. You will also need a medium size container for the kids to play with the mixture.

We split the milk and vinegar into two saucepans, 1 cup per child and also to make 2 different colours.

Pour one cup of milk into a saucepan and gently warm the milk on the stove but do not let it boil. Turn off the heat; add a drop of food colouring and two tablespoons of vinegar. Stir the milk and watch as the mixture changes!

Continue to stir (pan will be hot) the milk until lumps form. Kids will be amazed as they watch two different things happen, a thick, lumpy and a watery liquid begin to appear, it is no longer a smooth consistent mixture.

Place the strainer over the bowl and the chux cloth over the strainer. Pour the milk into the strainer and leave it for a few minutes to drip out. Squeeze out the rest of the milk into the bowl. It is important to try and get out as much liquid as possible as this will help speed up the length of time it takes for the number shapes to dry out.

Place the lumpy part of the milk into a plastic container. You do not have to do this part of the science experiment but I wanted my girls to explore the product that was made from the vinegar and milk. With their hands, my girls squished, squashed, rubbed, flattened and played with the lumpy mixture, a great sensory experience.

With a spoon and using the tips of your fingers, scoop the lumps into the number cookie cutters.

Remove the cutter and with a straw carefully make a small hole at the top of the number shape. This is completely optional; we planned to use the holes to later thread some string through the number shapes. Leave the number shapes on the tray to dry and as they dry they will shrink a little. It takes a couple of days for the number shapes to dry completely.

With our Milk Numbers we made necklaces and a chain with all the numbers laid out in order. They can also be used as a concrete tool for kids to learn and recognise numbers.

Who would have thought that vinegar and milk would make these hard milk numbers?

What is happening?

Milk contains chains of molecules known as casein, which are normally curled up and dissolved, when you add vinegar, the molecules curl into different shapes and form sold plastic lumps instead.

Filed Under: Science Play | Tagged: Tagged With: Messy Play Ideas, Science Activities, Sensory Play Activities

Making Honeycomb – Exploring Bi-Carbonate Soda

Posted by Janice on April 17, 2012 4 Comments

After making our Homemade Volcano and watching the excitement on my kids’ faces as the vinegar and bicarbonate soda reacted together, I thought I would extend the fun, fizzing and frothing into the kitchen by making some simple homemade honeycomb.

What you will need?

You will need a large saucepan and baking tray.

The ingredients are:

1 Cup White Sugar

¼ Cup Golden Syrup

3 Tablespoons Water

2 Teaspoons Bicarbonate Soda

Combine the sugar, golden syrup and water into the saucepan and place onto the stove to heat and dissolve the mixture. Bring the mixture to boil and then simmer for 5 minutes.

The fun and exciting part: Remove from the heat and add the bicarbonate soda and mix it through carefully. Be careful the mixture is very hot! The mixture will increase in size, do not over mix.

Pour the mixture into the tin to cool and refrigerate.

To take a closer look at the Honeycomb there are numerous bubbles, some really small and others much bigger. Some of the bubbles can be seen in the photos that have popped. They are also noticeable when you cut the honeycomb up into pieces for eating.

The bicarbonate soda and vinegar reaction explained –

The acid in the vinegar (golden syrup) reacts with the sodium bicarbonate in baking soda to form an unstable carbonic acid which breaks down and creates carbon dioxide. The bubbles that you see from the reaction are the carbon dioxide escaping the solution that is left. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air so it overflows the container and makes the solution appear to be doubling in size.

Download and print a copy of the recipe here: Printable Honeycomb Recipe

Click on the image to find out How to Make a Homemade Volcano?:

Filed Under: Kid Friendly Recipes, Science Play | Tagged:

How to Make a Homemade Volcano?

Posted by Janice on April 11, 2012 1 Comment

Watching a homemade volcano erupt is a very exciting experience for young children as they watch and learn about the amazing power of these geological formations.

Making your own homemade volcano is really simple and requires basic material that you can find around the home.

Recently after reading a non-fiction book about volcanoes and earth quakes, it aroused an interest particularly about volcanoes with Miss 4 and 5. There was a number of questions and some misconceptions so we went on to explore these questions and then onto making our own homemade volcano.

What you will need?

You will need an empty plastic bottle (this is 1 litre bottle), newspaper torn up in strips, PVA craft glue, masking tape and a container for the water and glue mixture.

To make the lava to mimic that of a real volcano you will need bicarbonate soda, red and yellow food colouring (or orange) and white vinegar.

To make the basic shape of a volcano I cut the middle of the plastic bottle out and then overlapped the two ends together securing it with masking tape. To give the volcano a more pyramid/mountain shape I then rolled newspaper into a tube shape and wrapped it around the base of the plastic bottle and securing it all with masking tape.

Time to get messy: applying paper mache to our volcano using small strips of newspaper dipped into a gluey water mixture. We also folded a small amount of newspaper into the opening of the bottle but making sure there was enough room to add our bicarbonate soda and vinegar later.

Tip – keep some old flannels or cloths handy for the kids to wipe their hands on.

When the paper mache was dry, Miss 4 and 5 set to work to paint the volcano. We had watched a few videos on You Tube about volcanos and it was decided that the volcano needed to be black, dark grey and a little bit of brown. While we were waiting for the paint to dry we had a practise run to see how much bicarbonate soda and vinegar would be needed for the homemade volcano. To give you a bit of an idea, we used 4 tablespoons of bicarbonate soda and 1 cup of vinegar mixed with some red and yellow food dye and this seemed to work fine.

Sifting the bicarbonate soda into the funnel and about to pour in the vinegar…..you have to be super quick to get the funnel out. Miss 5 was standing by ready to grab it after Miss 4 poured in the vinegar.

Our homemade volcano fizzing and frothing as the bicarbonate soda and vinegar react together.

Making a homemade volcano is a fun and simple process that kids will take on a sense of pride, ownership and achievement of what they have accomplished. All this while learning new things and practising some basic skills with an almighty eruption at the end. We repeated the erutpion 3 times!

Some simple facts about volcanoes:

A volcano is a mountain that erupts.
Rock under the earth’s surface is so hot that it melts. This melted rock is called magma.
Erupting magma is called lava.
Volcanoes become bigger every time they erupt as the lava cools and makes a new layer of rock.
Volcanoes can erupt under water and form new islands from the cooled lava.
Volcanoes can be found on the moon and other planets.
There are more than 500 active volcanoes on Earth.

As a result of this activity, my kids were very intrigued about how bicarbonate soda and vinegar react together – Here is an activity to extend this learning throuh making Homamde Honeycomb. Click on the image to see the full post!