Speedy Science: hot and cold

This experiment was messy so do it somewhere it is easy to mop up the water, we used the bathroom, outside would work too.

What you need:

• 2 identical jars
• a piece of card big enough to cover the top of the jar
• a jug of cold water, coloured with food colour, blue
• a jug of hot water, coloured with food colour, red (slightly hotter than bath water)

1. Fill the first jar with the blue cold water.

2. Fill the second jar with the red hot water.

3. Place the card on the jar of hot water.

4. This is the tricky bit... hold the card and carefully tip the jar and card upside down...

5. Place the jar on top of the cold water jar, make sure the mouths of the jars are aligned. Then carefully remove the card...

6. Taa-daaa the colours don't mix!

7. But wait! What happens if you do it the other way around? Repeat the exercise but this time with the cold water on top, what happens?

I must admit, we had a couple of hiccups doing this and didn't quite get the jars aligned, good job we were doing it in the bathroom! Fun trick though.

The science...

Liquids of a higher density will sit beneath those of a lower density. Therefore this proves that hot water has a lower density to cold water. This is because the molecules in hot water are moving faster than the cold water molecules, which creates more space around them thereby reducing the density.

Don't forget to share the post if you think your friends would like to dye their bathroom floors purple too...

What Freezes Quicker Milk or Water?

These are the kind of questions I constantly have fired at me! This time, I decided we would figure it out ourselves, well with a little help from our friend google too.

What you need:

• Ice-tray
• Pen and paper
• Different liquids to put in the ice-tray
• Toothpick
• Freezer
• Timer

1. Start off by drawing a replica of your ice-tray, we don't actually have a proper ice tray so we used this tray that is for making chocolate skulls! 

2. Fill up each hole in your ice-tray with different types of liquid and make a note of which liquid is in which hole. 

3. Pop in the freezer and set the timer for 30 minutes. Go and play.

4. When the timer goes off, take out the ice-tray and use the toothpick to see how hard each liquid has frozen (if at all). Make a note of what is happening.

5. Set the time again for another 30 minutes and repeat.

6. After 2 hours, set the timer for 1 hour and after 4 hours set it for 6 then leave over night. Each time, make observations of what is going on.

Once we had a list of what had frozen at what rate, google came in handy to find out why.

7. Write a report on the findings.

Japanese gadget books

Ebi-kun gets a shed load of homework to do over the holidays, I know, insane right? He has to keep a diary, do 2 drawings of the tomato plant his has grown, before and after pictures, he gets a book full of Japanese and kanji and another of maths and he has to make or do some kind of project.

Luckily, we are a crafty kind of family plus the Japanese book companies have caught on and you can buy some great books for making crafts. We spotted some this year that come with a box of pieces to make all the crafts in the book.

Ebi-kun got it out the other day, I had some work to do so I basically left him to it. It was so funny, he totally did what I would have done. He looked through the book and decided he wanted to make something with a propeller but he didn't want to make the exact project they had in the book, he had his own ideas of what he wanted to make. He is definitely a chip off the old block, that is just what I do with almost any sewing/crafting/recipe book!

He did struggle a bit at first but I told him to figure out and he did! Here is his testing car, he said he wanted to make sure it worked then he will make it fancy - good thinking. I'm not sure if this will be the final project or not. There are about 15 in the book and he also got a build your own contraption kit for his birthday, we will see what happens next...

7 fun weather experiments to do at home

Remember a couple of weeks ago I posted about the thunderstorm experiment? We I have put all the other experiment sheets together into one PDF, 7 in all. They are all easy, fun and use things that you have at home. You need to pop over to My Organized Chaos to download them (I can store the files myself over there).

If you think you know someone who would enjoy doing this with their kids then please share using Facebook, twitter, smoke signals...

How to make a thunderstorm in your kitchen

And it's not as dangerous as it sounds! It is actually an experiment to see how the warm and cold fronts interact. We have been having some cracking thunderstorms recently so this was a great little experiment to do.

I have written it out as a PDF (below) for you print out. It has the full instructions and I also included a section so you (the child) can record what happens.

Fill a clear container about 2/3 full with lukewarm water. let it sit for a minute or two. Then add a blue ice-cube at one end of the container and a few drops of red food colour at the other end. Watch what happens.

The blue water should sink, pushing the red water up.

Looking from the side of the box gives a better view, the purple, mixed water is where the thunderstorm would take place, the purple shows the unstable air. It is a pretty neat experiment because trying to explain this concept to a child is quite difficult, with the water they can see exactly how the air moves. When you do this though, explain that there is not going to be big bangs and flashes of lightning!

Download the PDF HERE, I have more of these experiments so I will share them as we do them.

***UPDATE*** the full booklet of experiments can be downloaded over on MOC HERE.
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How to separate an egg with a PET bottle...

I have to thank gaijinwife for this idea. After she posted a video of her son doing it on Facebook, Ebi-kun decided he wanted a go. Make sure you wash out the bottle well before you try it and you want to use a bottle that you can squeeze and it will pop back into shape when you release the pressure. Some of the PET bottles these days are crushable so they don't work very well.

The video is silly, if you have a 7 year old boy they will probably be amused! enjoy.

Quick reminder that the Early Bird offer only last for a short time, if you want to grab a bargain, sign up quick. Click the button!

How colouring mixing can teach patience...

I think we now live in a time where we expect instant results to everything, we expect instant replies to emails and text messages and we often choose quick fixes over working at something over a period of time. So when it come to doing craft and projects with Ebi-kun, I like to throw in some patience testing projects.

This one I totally stole from Chasing Cheerios and although it was a slow project, it was fun.

What you need:

6 glasses

Red, blue and yellow food colour (I used Wilton gel)

Water in a jug

Something to mix with

6 sheets of kitchen paper

Pour water into the 6 glasses, the three that will be plain water need less than the coloured water, took me a while to future that out!

Add colour to three of the glasses so you have a red, a yellow and a blue glass and mix well. Then place the glasses in a ring as shown below.

Fold the kitchen paper in half then half again to make a long strip. Link each glass with a strip of kitchen paper to make a ring.

Sit and watch. This was about an hour after we put it together in the morning....

This was dinner time, as you can see the colour hadn't moved much. That is when I realised that the plain water glasses should have less water in them, so I removed a bit of the water.

This was the following morning, Ebi-kun was the first downstairs, I could here him shouting 'it worked'. Not only had the colors travelled along the kitchen paper it had also mixed in the plain water glasses, so they were now purple, orange and green.

We wondered what to do with the kitchen paper, we decided to put it on a big sheet of paper to dry.

Which gave us even more beautiful results! Now I am wishing I had used a piece of fabric instead!

And the kitchen paper... we scrunched them up to make pretty roses....

Ebi-kun is now old enough to predict and deduce results but he was still surprised when he saw the secondary colours in the glasses, I must admit, I enjoyed doing this too!

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The Boy In The Bubble...

It was back to school this morning for Ebi-kun although it is only a half day, I have to go and pick him up after the earthquake drill. So Saturday, we decided to go out since it was the last weekend of the holidays, we headed into Tokyo to go to the Science Museum. It is the first time we have been to this one. There are 5 floors and the 5th floor is great, loads of hands on stuff to do.

In fact, I would say it is worth going, just for the 5th floor, we definitely spent the most time up there. I was a bit disappointed that there was a general lack of explanation on most of the experiments, it was a good job both myself and hubby have a background in engineering!

This was cool, making a giant bubble you can stand in. There were also demonstrations on all the floors, run by the staff, they had a schedule of what was going on and some of them you needed to pay for.

Ebi-kun liked the 2nd floor where they had lots of cars and a motorbike to 'ride', hubby was into seeing the insides of cars and all that jazz, by this point I was getting bored, each to their own! If you do go, I recommend taking your own food, we ate at the canteen and although the food was edible, it wasn't great.

It was a fun day out, quite a trek for us to get there so I'm not sure if we will go back anytime soon. We did have an amusing incident on the train home. Ebi-kun and I were watching Bear Grylls clips on YouTube and the woman next to Ebi-kun was watching over his shoulder, I seriously thought she was going the throw up after watching the one where he eats live rhino larva! I can't imagine what she went home and told her family about the strange foreigner on the train!

Electric fun....

We have been doing some more of the Action Pack experiments, the 'static electricity hair and balloon experiment' was very popular, Ebi-kun thought it was highly amusing. 

And we tried picking up paper with it too.

Then we tried another baking soda and vinegar experiment, I am now all out of baking soda! There is a similar sort experiment in the pack but this version is out an old magazine, something I saved years ago and now I'm not sure where I got it from.

Use a funnel and half fill the balloon with baking soda, carefully remove the funnel.

Pour some vinegar into a plastic bottle, we used about 1/5th of the bottle. Then pull the balloon opening over the bottle but don't let the baking soda fall in the bottle.

When it is secure, lift up the balloon and shake the contents into the bottle....

Sit back and watch the magic! We left the experiment out over night and the balloon had deflated this morning but not completely. Ebi-kun had made a note of the time and day of the experiment and we are going to see how long it takes for it to deflate completely.

I picked up a bag of lemons the other day so I will ask Ebi-kun which of the Action Pack zesty recipes he wants to try.

sink Vs float and the balance game

We had a busy morning today, I gave BabyEbi a presentation of the float and sink exercise, I wasn't sure if he would grasp the concept or not but he did quite well. I don't think he can do it unsupervised yet, I will help him again next time and see how it goes, he seem to understand the difference but then forget which bowl was which. He did enjoy doing it though and repeated the exercise 4 times.

To do the work he half filled a bowl of water, then took an object off the tray and put it in the bowl, if it floated he would then dry it and put it in the 'float' boat (use labels to help) and if it sank he would put it in the 'sink' bowl.

He then got out his balance game, I bought this at Muji quite a while ago but he is only just getting the concept. The players take it in turns rolling the dice, you have to pick up a cylinder of the right colour and place it on the "moon" shaped block, keep taking it in turns trying not to knock the rest of the cylinders off. BabyEbi used to ge upset when it collapsed but now he just thinks it is funny. He also added some of his own rules, once all (or most) of the cylinders are on the moon shape, you roll the dice and take that colour off the moon then use the cylinder to build a tower - which usually falls over after 4 or 5 pieces, more laughter!!