Tag Archives: experiments

Uncategorized

Liquid Layer’s 👩‍🔬 👨‍🔬

Leave a comment

Today in the discovery room, we found some interesting new books about science, and even found some experiments we wanted to put into practice.

 

“Look, it’s a big spaceship!!”

The children chose their favourite experience from the book and have loved experimenting with different liquids.  We explored how they can change when mixed together, and what happens to the different layers. We used very basic ingredients, and got to mixing! The children liked predicting what they thought might happen…

“Is it going to explode like a volcano?”

“Maybe it will fizz up!”

We simply mixed water with food colouring, oil and golden syrup to create our magic mixture. The children suggested we all tried adding it in different orders to see if the outcome would be any different. We were really interested to see that no matter what order we mixed our ingredients, it turned out exactly the same every time!

“It’s because the syrup is the heaviest!”

“The oil is floating to the top. Look at the bubbles, it’s like a lava lamp!”

“Bubbles!!”

As the syrup is much more dense than the other liquids, it sunk to the bottom each time, and the oil floated all the way to the top. We even put all our mixtures into one big jug to see what would happen, and it turned back into 3 perfect layers!

Well done everybody! Let’s get our thinking caps on for our next experiment 👩‍🔬 👨‍🔬

 

Uncategorized

Milk and Germ Science Experiment

Leave a comment

It’s Friday, what better way to end the week with a science experiment. Well, it is British Science Week!

Today in the Discovery Room, in our technology area, we have decided to do a milk food colouring experiment on the light table. For this experiment  we gathered everything we needed-a bowl, milk, food colouring, fairy liquid and some cotton swabs.

We poured enough milk in a bowl to cover the surface with the depth of about a 1/4 inch. We then added a few drops of different food colouring in the centre of the bowl of milk quite close to each other.

Next for the fun bit ! We dipped the cotton swabs in a small amount of fairy liquid and then dipped it in the colours one at a time for around 10/15 seconds.
We were careful to move each swap onto one colour at a time, without disturbing the milk.
We were amazed to see how the colours swirled and changed in the milk especially when we placed the cotton swab on to the different colours .


Wow look at the burst of colours!

“ It’s like fireworks ”  “ It’s moving “

”It turned into a new colour” “ It has waves in it”

”The milk has changed colour “   “It looks like dynamite”

We developed our science skills by investigating the effects of adding substance together which cause a reaction.

Because we had so much fun, we decided to do a Germ Experiment.
We added a good coating of glitter into a bowl of water (if you don’t have glitter you can use pepper instead ). Whilst we did this, we discussed how the glitter represented the germs. We then dipped our fingertips into the water and watched how the glitter stuck to our finger, this showed us how germs stick to our hands if we don’t wash them with soap. The children then dipped their clean finger into soapy water before dipping it back into the bowl. The children were amazed to see how the glitter/germs spread  across the water avoiding their soapy finger.

“ Germs stuck to our finger”  “Germs don’t like soap”

We concluded that if we use soap to wash our hands, we can avoid germs. This experiment also developed our well-being skill by learning how to keep clean and healthy.

It was fun and enjoyable to create these  memorable science experiences for the children, so why not continue British science week at home over the weekend and perhaps send us some photographs of you budding scientists!

Digital Technology, Outdoor Learning

Hot and Cold “what happens ?”

Leave a comment

What happens to water when it’s freezing cold?
Freezing happens when molecules of liquid get so cold that they slow down enough to hook onto each other to form a solid crystal. We watched this happen in slow motion on our iPads.  It thought it looked like crocodiles, birds or leaves. We then made our own ice cubes, we poured the water into the trays and placed it in the freezer.

The ice cubes are sticky and cold. I see patterns inside them . They melt in my hand but they are still cold ..

That was something cold but what about hot things? What happens when you add heat to popcorn?

Popcorn pops because each kernel has a tiny bit of water inside it. When the kernels are heated up to the point where it exerts enough pressure, the kernel bursts open. The soft material inside puffs up as it explodes. This then cools and forms the odd shapes we know and love to eat.

The shapes got the children discussing some safety rules; “it is very hot”, “we wouldn’t touch it”. Then they started to chat about what shapes and textures had been produced. “Mine looks like a horse.”  “I found the seed, it is hard.” “My popcorn is crispy.”

As the popcorn comes from seeds we have decided to plant them and grow our own popcorn plant! We have put the seeds in the green house. Let’s see what happens next!

We have had a lot of fun today trying out our experiments for science week and learnt lots of new information. We have lots of different experiments to try out throughout the week and we cannot wait!