I found this experiment on one of my favourite sites - learning4kids.net - I love their ideas and am always using this site as inspiration for play activities.
To be honest, I wasn't sure how much my boys (3.5 year old and 2.5 year old) would get out of this experiment - they had never really been interested in Crystals before, so I wasn't sure how interesting the experiment would be to them.
Little did I know how much they would get from it - I can't believe that they are constantly asking for "Bicarbonate of soda" and using the word "dissolve" ALL the time!
- First, we filled two glasses with water.
- The kids then put a spoonful of bicarb of soda into their cup, taking turns and sharing the spoon. It was actually incredible how they were willing to share and follow the "first N then E" rule we had. They continued this until the bicarb didn't dissolve anymore.
Each time they put in a teaspoon of Bicarb of Soda, the water would fizzle and the kids would get so excited - they excitedly made the "fizz" sound themselves and had a good giggle every time they heard it. They noticed how bubbles formed when they put in the bicarb of soda and this made them even more excited. The kids were counting how many spoons of bicarb were in there. They were saying "now it's your turn, now it's my turn". They were telling each other to be careful not to spill the bicarb. When N had a little sneaky taste of the bicarb, E gently told him to stop doing that because it will make him sick. It was just so cute. I love how they were interacting!
- We then tied two paperclips on each end of a long string and placed them in the water. The hard thing about this experiment is that you had to wait to see results... but having said that our crystals started growing about an hour later - they looked like this:
- We waited a week for our crystals to grow. Our crystals grew mainly over the glasses and on the bottom of the glass in the water. The kids loved looking and touching them every morning - they went from soft and fragile to quite hard. Our crystals didn't grow over the string - I think if we had wet the string as well they may had grown... I would be interested to know if anyone does this experiment if their crystals grew on the string and how they did it?? :)
- Surprisingly, something else we noticed was that the water in one of the cups turned a beautiful aqua blue - obviously was the colour of the wool we used. E kept asking why the other glass of water hadn't turned blue!
Because the kids were so excited about the bubbles in the water, I decided to do another quick experiment with them after the crystals - check out my next Blog entry -
Dancing Sultanas!
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