If theirs one thing teaching has taught me, its that I love the teaching and learning process. I also love sharing my knowledge with others. That being said, when my son came up to me and asked me how to make a ball, the first thing I thought of was an experiment that was fun to do with preschoolers around this time.
See, with just two basic household ingredients you not only have great dishes you could make, but you also have a fun science experiment to do with your kids that will teach them the concept of something taking time, and honestly anytime he asks a question that could be a teaching moment for him I try to take advantage of.
The Experiment
The general concept of this experiment is taking a raw egg, and putting it in a cup, or bowl and covering it with white vinegar. In the classroom, I’ve also seen it done in like a zip lock bag and pinned on your focus board. Almost instantly your going to see little tiny bubbles take over the egg.
Day 1:
Day one consisted of putting everything together. So I found an old strawberry jam jar and we carefully put a raw egg inside and I filled it up with vinegar. Almost instantly my son noticed the tiny bubbles that were quick to surround the egg. “Its like its eating it” he commented.
Day 2:
This is when we finally started to notice minimal changes. The egg was slowly turning colors, and when my son touched it he said it was softer. By the end of day 2 there was some pretty noticeable changes, including a calcium foam that had accumulated at the top.
Day 3:
Is when we noticed the egg looked bigger, like it had swollen. When we touched it, you could see some white stuff just fly off the egg. The foam at the top had dissipated, and we were left with a somewhat translucent egg that was swollen, with bubbles still eating away at whatever calcium was left on the egg. This is when my son had the question “Does it still look the same on the inside?” so we decided when we were done letting it soak, and doing our experiments, we would be cutting into it to see what changed on the inside.
Day 4:
Now that it was on our 4th day now, it was time to see how the egg felt, but most importantly, time to see if it was going to bounce. After we drained the vinegar out, the egg didn’t seem as swollen as I originally thought it was. It felt like a rubber ball, but it was so odd that it did that I was in denial. There was a slime factor to it, but the longer you held it the more used to it you got. To my sons surprise, when you weren’t trying to drop it from a decently sized drop, it did in fact bounce like a ball! So, after showing his dad, and his sister, we started trying to see if the bounce changed at all on different surfaces. We tried a wooden desk, the kitchen table, the folding desk I use for blogging, and finally….the sidewalk, from a higher drop. The egg did not survive, and in fact still looked like it had a yellow yolk inside. My son was heartbroken and so he thought up a part 2.
Soaking eggs in different kinds of vinegar. Will it result in the same answers?
Stay tuned!