A fun fact from NGKids :

“Bet You Didn’t Know: Twenty inches of snow equals one inch of water on average.”

From “Outdoor Science Lab for Kids” (Quarry Books 2016)

Try it!  Put some snow in a clear container and measure how deep it is.  Then, allow it to melt.  Measure how deep the remaining water is.

from “Outdoor Science Lab for Kids” Quarry Books 2016

Now observe the melted water in a clear glass. How clear is it?

From “Outdoor Science Lab for Kids” Quarry Books 2016

You can figure out whether your results were consistent with the NG Kids fact (10 inches of snow* should melt down to around 1/2  inch of water or 50cm of snow* should melt down to 2.5cm.)

A snow crystal is a single crystal of ice formed when the water in a cloud freezes around a microbe or piece of dust. Some have long, feathery branches, while others are small and plate-like, but they all have six sides. Snowflakes can contain several snow crystals, stuck together. Sometimes they form large clumps, creating huge, fluffy snowflakes.

The shape of snow crystals, the weather, and the surface where the snow lands all affect how much air is trapped when snow piles up. The amount of air contained in a layer of snow determines much space it takes up.

When snow melts, the snow crystals turn to water and the trapped air is released. That’s why the snow in your bucket is much deeper than the water from the melted snow.

*I’m guessing that NG Kids was referring to unpacked snow.  Our kids packed the snow into containers and we go more water than we expected.  Ask your kids why they think packed snow melts to give you more water than unpacked snow.

“Dad!  Ask me scientific question!” was a common refrain from the backseat of our station wagon when I was a kid.   My dad is a physicist, and encouraged my sister and me from a young age to think about the world around us.  On one level, I’m sure that talking about science was a way for me to connect with my dad, but after some time, I started to look at the world differently and ask my own questions.

On long car trips, we loved to play twenty questions.  Not only was it a fun game, but without realizing it, we were learning to organize information and ask good questions.

“Is it an animal?”

“Yes!”

“Does it eat meat?”

“Yes!”

“Is it a mammal?”

“What’s a mammal?”

In other words, you don’t even need a lab, or even a kitchen table to do science.  Every time you bend over to look at a bug, point out a bird or talk about the moon, you’re doing science with your kids.  Teaching them to be curious is one of the greatest gifts you can give.

How do you teach your kids to be curious?

We turned our kitchen into a Halloween science lab this morning for the Fox9 news. The kids had a blast!  Here’s one of the segments on how to make “Magic Potion”:

This is a great Halloween eggsperiment and a jar of them would make a spooky centerpiece for a Halloween party!

Put some raw eggs into jars and cover the eggs with (white or cider) vinegar.  It’s fun to use permanent markers to make the eggs look like eyeballs before you put them in the vinegar!  Remember to always wash your hands after handling raw eggs, since they can carry a bacteria called Salmonella enteriditis!

Do you notice anything happening to the eggs when you add the vinegar?

Let them sit overnight in the refrigerator and see what they feel like the next day.  What happened to the sharpie ink?  Before handling the eggs, gently rinse them with water, and be careful not to get vinegar in your eyes, since vinegar is an acid and stings!

Image from Kitchen Science Lab for Kids (Quarry Books 2014)

Only the membrane of the egg will remain, which is like a rubbery balloon.  What does it feel like?

If you want, draw or record what you observed in your science notebook.

What happened?  Egg shells are made up of two chemical elements called calcium and carbon, which stick together in calcium carbonate crystals.  Vinegar is an acid that break the crystals apart in a chemical reaction.  The  carbon and vinegar react to form carbon dioxide bubbles, which you probably noticed when you added the vinegar to the eggs.

To make alien monster eggs,  return the eggs to the  jars.  Cover them with corn syrup and add some green food coloring.  Leave them for 24 hours in the refrigerator and see how they feel the next day!

What happens?  The balloon-like membrane of the soft eggs let water molecules pass through via a process called osmosis. Corn syrup doesn’t have much water in it, and water molecules move out of the egg into the corn syrup, making the egg shrivel.

Image from Kitchen Science Lab for Kids (Quarry Books 2014)

If you want to, now try rinsing the eggs and submerging them in water again overnight (in the fridge.)

Happy eggsperimenting!

Sometimes experiments work and sometimes they don’t.  The kids have been begging me to do the “Soda Geyser” experiment with Menthos for as long as I can remember, so we finally tried it on day 5 of Science Camp.

It was a flop.

We did everything right, as far as I could tell, but we used 7-UP instead of Diet Coke, since that’s what I had on hand.  Some scientists think the artificial sweetener in Diet Coke helps create a more violent reaction.  I’m not sure, but all we got when we dumped the Menthos into the soda was a very small geyser.  Let’s just say I felt really silly for yelling at the kids to stand back.

We’ll try again soon with Diet Coke and I expect we’ll have better results.

If you want to try this experiment, you’ll need a two liter bottle of Diet Coke, a roll of Menthos mints and a piece of paper.

Remove the lid from the soda and set it on a flat surface (outside!)  Roll the paper so it will fit into the mouth of the bottle and fill it with the Menthos.  Quickly dump the mints into the bottle and stand back.  Hopefully, you’ll see a huge gyser of soda shoot up from the mouth of the bottle!

Scientists aren’t sure exactly why the Menthos cause such an explosive reaction, but they think it has to do with chemicals in the Menthos breaking the surface tension at the same time that carbon dioxide (CO2) bubbles form on the surface of the mints, causing a huge, very fast release of carbon dioxide bubbles.

Try it and let me know how it works!

We discovered two easy experiments you can do with milk and vinegar.  One is hot, and requires adult supervision, and the other is done at room temperature.  Who knew you could make plastic and glue from milk?

Milk Plastic

The first experiment we tried was making “plastic” from milk curds.  Heat about a cup of milk in a pan until it gets a scum on top or gets lumpy.

The scum that forms looks like plastic wrap!

Our milk curds before adding the vinegar

Skim off the scum (curds) with a spoon and put them into a small bowl to cool. Eventually, we got tired of skimming and just let a thick layer form on top of the liquid.  Then, I poured the hot milk out of the pan and scraped out the curds with a spoon, adding them to the curds we’d already collected. Add a tsp. of vinegar and let the mixture cool for about an hour.  Then, slowly pour off the liquid (we blotted some off with a paper towel too) and knead the “plastic”.  You can shape your plastic into anything you want- beads, balls, animals and allow it to dry on a paper towel.  When it’s dry, you can even paint it!  Our plastic was very soft and gooey, so we rolled it into small balls on toothpicks to make beads.

Milk contains a protein called casein, which is a polymer, or a chain, or long molecules which can bend and move until the plastic hardens.

Homemade Glue

We also made glue using milk and vinegar.  Just add a cup of milk and 1/3 cup white vinegar to a clear jar or bowl.  Mix gently and allow the mixture to settle until you can see two layers.  The curds are the white layer on the bottom of the jar and the whey is the liquid on top.  Fish some of the curds out with a spoon or sieve, or just pour off the whey.  The curds can be used as glue.  We tried it and found that our homemade glue worked pretty well for gluing paper together!

Our glue works!

The vinegar separates the milk, allowing the fat, minerals and casein protein to form curds.   White glue is made from caseins of milk curds.  Cheeses, as you probably already know, are made from curds.

I wonder how hard it is to make homemade edible cheese curds.  Maybe that will be a project for another day.

Day 3 of Science camp was ninety-five degrees and humid, so we spent most of the afternoon studying the cooling effect of water at the city pool.

When we got home, we did an easy experiment using water, fruit juice and baking soda and found that by adding baking soda to different juices, you can see which juices contain citric acid.  You can even taste the results! Baking soda is a base, and many fruit juices contain citric acid.  When the two are combined, carbon dioxide gas is formed as bubbles in the liquid, carbonating it. My kids loved this experiment!

Just pour about a cup of lemonade, orange juice, grape juice, or any other juice into separate glasses.  Pour a glass of water as a control. Water doesn’t contain citric acid, so won’t produce bubbles.  Then, add about half a teaspoon of baking soda to each glass and taste the results.

We were surprised to find that our grape juice produced bubbles, but discovered that it contained added citric acid when we read the label!  A side effect of this experiment is kids asking to add baking soda to their juice at breakfast so that they can have “pop”.

Not only are Sun Chips bags the noisiest chip bags ever manufactured, but the company claims that they’re biodegradable and will break down completely in about 13 week, in a hot compost pile.

Yesterday, the kids and I became consumer detectives as we buried a Sun Chips bag to see how well it breaks down in our own back yard.  All we needed was a Sun Chips bag (which had been quickly emptied by my chip-deprived children), a few fruit scraps, and a shovel.  (Be sure to dig in a spot where there are no power lines buried.  You can check with your local electric company if you’re not sure.)

First, we dug a shallow hole near our garden, in a spot that gets lots of sun and put our chip bag in the hole.  We’re lucky enough to have a curbside organic recycling program in our neighborhood, so we don’t have a compost heap of our own. To make up for the compost deficit, and add some heat and microbes from rotting vegetation, we threw in a few watermelon rinds, tomato scraps and avacado skins from the compost bin in our sink.  Then, we put dirt on top of our little “compost heap” and put a rock on top to mark the spot.  Finally, we watered the dirt to get the process started.

In about three weeks, we’ll dig under the rock to see what is happening.  According to the information on the Sun Chips bag, it should be starting to break down.  After that, we’ll check it every four weeks or so.  The bag says it takes about 13 weeks to break down completely.

Do you have a compost heap?  Composting is a great way to make beautiful, nutrient-filled dirt for your garden and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.  According to the Environmental Protection agency, 26% of the solid waste we produce is made up of yard and food waste.  You can go to their website for more information on composting.

It’s been a stormy summer in Minnesota, and we’ve seen more than our fair share of tornadoes.  As a kid, I was always fascinated by stories of pieces of straw from a field being driven into  wooden planks in barns and houses by the swirling winds.

With a potato, plastic drinking straws and a glass of water, we were able to see for ourselves how this could happen.  Like drinking straws, real straw is hollow and although a potato is much softer than a piece of wood, we got the picture.  I was skeptical about the experiment, but it worked!

Just soak a potato in a glass of water for about 30 minutes.  We used a red, boiling potato, because that’s what I had on hand.

Then, grasp a straw tightly, near the middle and stab it into the potato.  We were surprised to find that, instead of breaking or bending, the straw can be driven quite a way into the potato.  This happens because objects in motion, like the straw, tend to stay in motion and objects at rest, like the potato, tend to stay at rest.  This is known as inertia.  In addition, the thin edges of a drinking straw don’t offer much resistance.

Try it!