Showing posts with label Indoor Activity. Show all posts

Milk, soap, and food coloring



An easy experiment to show how fats move in liquids.

How does soap work?  What do hydrophilic and hydrophobic mean? This is a good experiment to start some of these discussions.  The fats in the milk are oil based (technically, they're called lipids) and the water in the milk is well, water.   Fats and oils are hydrophobic, which translates into "water fearing".  These fat molecules will clump together so that as few of them touch the water as possible.

Soap is a molecule that has a hydrophobic side and a hydrophilic side. (Hydrophillic ==  water loving. This is useful in our daily lives because the hydrophobic side of soap molecules will bind to oil and grease, and the hydrophilic side of the soap molecule will bind to the water molecules.  Then, when you wash your hands, as the soap gets washed away, the oils and grease are dragged away along with the soap.  

So, back to the experiment.
When you add soap,  you'll see food coloring expand away as all the fat molecules push the food coloring out of the way to get closer to the hydrophobic soap molecules.   Kids of all ages will enjoy "painting" with soap in the milk.  Older kids can start to grasp the concept of hydrophobic vs hydrophilic.

Materials:
Plate
Milk (skim milk works best, but whole milk will also work)
Half and half
Soap [not all soaps work.  Joy dish soap does]
Q-tips or Toothpicks
Food coloring

What I do:
I pour milk into one of the plates. Then, we drop a few drips of food coloring around the plate.  The kids dip their Q-tips into the soap and then poke one of the food coloring drops.  The result should be to see the food coloring expand away from the soap.

To make this an experiment, I get another plate and pour in half-and-half (or a milk with a higher fat content than the one I previously used.).  Before the kids dip their soap into the new plate, I ask them whether the colors will spread more or less than last time, and I ask them why.  This is called 'making a hypothesis' and is crucial to running an experiment.   Then I let them test it out.

What this activity teaches:
Scientific Method.  It's important to have your kids guess (make a hypothesis) about what will happen.  To encourage more experimentation,  ask them what they think would make the colors expand faster?  I.e does warm milk vs cold milk work?  What about adding more dish soap vs adding a little bit?  See what they come up with first before you give them hints.

Hydrophobicity.   Certain materials repel water.  This is a great experiment to start the conversation of what hydrophobicity is, and how it is useful in everyday life.

How to teach the phases of the moon





An activity and toy that teaches kids the phases of the moon.  The kids got a ‘remote controlled moon in my room’ over the summer.  It’s pretty cool. It changes phases which prompted Wes and Rems to start learning the phase names.  We took this learning opportunity one step further and set up a lamp + globe + styrofoam ball in the living room and let Wes play around with how the phases change as the moon rotates around the earth.  I’ve since bought this toy for numerous friends. The kids love it, and we love it.

The Uncle Milton Moon in my Room is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/2qhxyjsMoonInRoom

Music :
Fanfare for Space. By Kevin MacCleod.
Available here: http://bit.ly/2Cj6eDgFanfareForSpace

Teardown electronics with kids


Learning electronics by taking things apart.

Almost every electrician, engineer, and scientist I know loves to take things apart to see how they work.  If you've got some old electronics lying around, spend an afternoon dissecting them before you throw it away.  You'll be surprised how much you know about inner workings of things.  And what you don't know, you can always look it up on the internet.

Safety Tips:
Remove any batteries, and don't mess with leaky batter fluid.  I prefer to use rubber gloves to remove leaking batteries.

A capacitor (these typically look like grain silos in your electrical boards) can hold a small to large shock.  To avoid any unpleasant shocks, you can "ground" the capacitor by touching the ends to a table, chair, or anything thing that touches the ground.  This allows any residual electrical charge to move from the capacitor to the earth.

Do NOT take apart an old TV monitor (the ones in the large boxes.  Flat screens are fine).   The capacitors in those screens are able to hold a lethal shock.  It's best not to mess them, especially around children who like to touch things.

 This activity teaches:
Electronics & Engineering & STEM.  Kids can pick up the basics of electronics, and identify how electricity flows through the system by following the wires.  If the toy has moving parts, you can play with the pieces to see how they work and affect each other.

Curiosity. Let's face it, you might not know what every piece in the toy does.  That's okay.  This is the type of activity that will peak a kids interest and get them googling for the reason behind different colored wires and how a speaker/radio works.  It's okay to not know, it's even better to look it up and find the answer on your own.

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