Chemistry for Kids

 After the enormous chemistry class for high school last semester, I am finally getting around to chemistry for the younger set.  In reality, all six Zoomlians are having fun with this, in addition to four from our friendly neighborhood home school family!

I am loosely following Janice Van Cleave's Chemistry for Every Kid.   Honestly, I love all her books.  I'm pretty picky about science experiments, but her books are gold mines!

We started out talking about matter, and our ability to experience matter through our senses.

We used taste to discover which bowl held salt and which one had sugar.

We used sight to find something made of matter and non-matter (people!).

Smells great!

 We used smell to figure out what was on the cotton balls stuck in film canisters.  This was so fun!  I used extracts from cooking (vanilla, lemon oil, cinnamon oil, almond extract), and from soap making (cedar oil, honeysuckle, bergamot, eucalyptus, lavender).

We used hearing to find my cell phone (which I had hidden with the timer running - sure glad that experiment worked!).

I think it's a...

And we used touch to discover what was in the "feely bag."

I don't know if you've ever tried this, but it's a great party game/ way to settle the shrieking hordes on a rainy day.  Not that I ever get shrieking hordes running around the house until some one gets hurt, you understand.

You just take a pillow case and wander around the house filling it with whatever random junk you trip over a carefully selected array of interesting objects.  The kid or kids have to feel inside the pillowcase without looking inside, and guess what is in there.


We also talked about matter taking up space and having mass.  This is always very interesting, especially as it refers to air.  It's so invisible and hard to sense, that revealing these properties seems like magic.

We did the wad of paper in an inverted jar under water trick.  For once, I had the foresight to write on the paper, "Hey, look!  I'm still dry!"  This amused the kids no end since, it was, in fact, still dry!

We also did the balloon in the bottle trick (which Mxyl is holding).  You put a balloon into the bottle with the neck of the balloon over the neck of the bottle.  It looks like you could just blow up the balloon inside the bottle, but, of course, the air in the bottle (but outside the balloon) takes up too much space to let the balloon inflate.

To show that air has mass, we weighed an empty balloon and a full one.  A word of caution on this one.  The difference is often only a gram (or less!) so only try this if you have a scientific scale (which I had because I bought on for the high school chem class!).  Also, I needed to add a loop of tape (to get the balloon to stay on the balance) and tare the scale beforehand.

When I was setting up the class,  I tried to make this work on my primary balance, and it actually showed the opposite because the air circulation in the house was adding force to the inflated balloon!

Lastly, I had given each kid a jar partially filled with rice and had them shake it side to side (not up and down - we got the best result by tapping the jar against our hands).  As the rice settled, the ball hidden in each jar rose to the surface showing that two objects can't occupy the same space at the same time.

And then we were out of time!  But tune in next week for at least as much fun!