Science Week: Water and Ice

Well, we were busy little scientists today ... at one point we had about four experiments going at one time. But, as I mentioned before, there are SO many things we wanted to try ... and just not enough time to do them all. Remember, over the weekend, we put some celery in food-colored water? Well, after four days - look at how it has turned out? Abby's hypothesis was correct (and so was Tyler's actually!), the colored water went all the way through the stalk, and turned the leaves blue or red. This meant we could begin the second half of our experiment ... transforming white carnations for 4th of July! We kept some white, but put some in red water and some in blue. We'll let you know what happens.We stayed with water for the next experiment. Did you know you can get the top of a full glass of water to "bulge" if you carefully add coins one-by-one? Neither did we, but our science book told us this would work ... and it did. We added seven coins before it started overflowing. Apparently it has something to do with "surface tension" and how the water molecules bind together to form a "skin" on the top of the glass. So cool!Oh, then we stopped to have a snack ... gummy worms that got trapped in a "petri dish" of Jell-O! You know I just can't help myself when it comes to making Jell-O Jigglers and such. Abby's friend, Lucy, was over today, and I couldn't tell if she thought this snack was cool ... or creepy. Oh well, it was "sciencey" and that's what I was going for!Next up ... ICE. I had frozen some star-shaped ice cubes (from my Pampered Chef days), so we broke a few out to do an experiment on melting. Which cube (a.k.a. star) would melt faster? The one put in cold water, the one in warm water, or the one on a plate by itself? The kids guessed correctly - warm water. And it DID melt very fast.We also learned that ice cubes melt faster when constant pressure is applied (i.e. the handle of a spoon) ...And when you add salt (but all of you cold weather people know THAT one!) ... We even filled a small cup (one of the restaurant ones Uncle Aaron gave us ... thanks A!) with water and froze it to see how water can quickly change from a liquid to a solid, and how it expands when it freezes.And, thanks to Lucy, we learned that gummy worms ALSO expand ... but in water! As you can see, I kind of let Abby do the labeling herself, and we're still working on the spelling of "Wednesday." But she got the "control group" terminology down just fine. It was so funny to hear her explain this to Grammy and Auntie Jenn, who came over tonight for dinner. Tomorrow, we have a few experiments for the kids to do with Grammy (I think I'm going to give her the messy ones! Insert evil scientist laugh here!)