Science in the Park - Absorption and Ice Science

This week we talked about 'absorption'.  We first did two experiments to demonstrate how something absorbs a liquid and then built ice castles!

Experiment 1: Celery Experiment

• Add some water and food coloring to a glass (if you plan to send these home with the kids - add it to an old jar).  Red or Blue food coloring will work best. 
• Then take a celery stick and cut an inch or more off the bottom.  It looks really cool if the celery stick has leaves.
• Place the celery stick in the glass (or jar) and wait for a couple hours (check it at 4 hours and 8 and 24 etc).  You should see the color coming up through the leaves. 
• If you break the celery stalk in half, you will see the color in the veins of the stalk (so cool!)

The Science: The celery stalk absorbs the colored water and when you break the stalk open you can see the veins that it traveled through.

Experiment 2: Paper Towel Experiment

• Take a cup (we used yogurt cups) and add some food coloring and water.  Use a primary color.
• Then take another cup and add another primary color food coloring and water.
• Take a paper towel (because we used small cups, we ripped the paper towel in half) and fold it so that it sits partially in the cup with the food coloring and partially in an empty cup. 
• The paper towel will absorb the water and transfer it to the empty cup mixing the two colors in the other cups.  So if you had red and blue in the cups - your middle cup will end up purple!  Don't forget to leave the middle cup empty and to give it 10 minutes or so.

Experiment 3: Ice Castle!

• This was so super cool and the kids just loved it! 
• Freeze a few containers of ice overnight (2 or 3 containers per kid).  I just used whatever Tupperware I had available.
• Give each child a tray to work in, a cup of coarse salt (or regular salt - course just looks neat), and a few cup of food coloring and water. 
• Give them a eye dropper or pipet to use for putting the water on the ice castle. 
• The kids can take the ice blocks and put salt on them to make them stick together. 
• If they add salt to the top of the ice and then pour water over it - it makes holes in the ice.  Then as you drip the colored water on top - you get a really awesome ice castle!

 

 

Enjoy!