Mystery Science Friday...

Today is the feast of St. Albert the Great, teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, Bishop, Naturalist, Patron Saint of Scientists, and one of my all time favorites!

But today we are working on gingerbread.


So we decided to celebrate yesterday!

I had nothing prepared, so I hauled out 8 of our many books of science experiments and turned the Zoomlians loose.

Leena started off with an interesting pressure experiment. Fill and cap a water bottle and poke a hole near the bottom with a push pin. Nothing happens. Until you squeeze the bottle at all. If you, say, grab the bottle to pick it up, you get a very forceful stream of water. Fortunately, she did not figure out the implications of this for mayhem. She was distracted by Klenda's experiment.

Klenda strung string between chairs and was exploring "equal and opposite reactions". She had a straw on the string and taped a balloon to the straw. She would blow up the balloon, then let it go sailing along the string. Then she noticed what Zorg was doing and decided she wanted a diver, too.

Zorg had cut a diver out of foil and attached air tanks (the bendy part of a straw) with a paper clip. Another paperclip at his feet made him bob upright. He put the little diver into a 2 liter soda bottle filled with water and put the cap on. After a few adjustments (more or less foil), the diver floated at the top. When you squeezed the bottle, the increased water pressure compressed the air in the straw and the diver sank. When you let go, the diver surfaced. Mxyl immediately started work on a robot diver.

The Mxyl got interested in experimenting with fire. He found different sizes of canning jars and a candle, and then experimented to see how long it took for the candle to use up the oxygen in the different sized jars. Everyone found this fascinating!

Zorg then got interested in making wine glasses "sing" with vibrations made by rubbing his finger on the rim of the glass. Different sized glasses and different amounts of water changed the pitch. All 4 Zoomlians figured out how to work together to make different chords and then performed a concert of Zoomlian music. It was unearthly, but beautiful!


We did other science stuff, too. Bill Nye, Magic School Bus and Brain Pop. Videos, books, and computer games are great, but there's nothing like time in the lab!