Science in the Kitchen!

My favorite subject is science.  Cooking and baking are big science experiments.  My kids and I were having fun with science today.  We mixed together salt and water and set it in a window so watch over the next few days.  As the water evaporates salts crystals will be left behind and they should cluster and look like snow flakes.  We will see.  We also mixed together sugar, water, and food coloring poured into glasses with sticks hanging in the middle.  Those glasses were also placed in a window so the sugar crystals can gather along the sticks making rock candy.  We will see if that works.  I hope so because it's fascinating looking at the crystals clustering. 

Rock candy. Sugar and water, waiting for crystals to form.

We also made a moon dough that was made of flour and oil.  The kids loved that because they could play with it and mold it. 

After that we put baking soda and vinegar in cups and watch the reaction.  They thought that was pretty amazing.  We actually ran out of vinegar.  My husband came to the rescue though and found out that you may also use lemon juice.  Wow!  I didn't know that.  However, we didn't have any.  But we did have lime juice. We tried it and it worked!  So the kids kept adding baking soda and lime juice until we ran out of juice.  They thought it was so cool.  We discussed how all the ingredients we used today we also use in baking but you can also do fun experiments with them.  The kids told me several items we bake that use the ingredients, such as, cookies, cakes, muffins, and pie crust.     



Mixing baking soda and lime juice.


I was enjoying myself and wanted to continue with the fascinating world of science so I took out a book I have that is about science in the kitchen.  It contains many recipes and explains the scientific aspect of each concept.  They had popcorn recipes so I was looking at those thinking we could make popcorn.  I found out that the kernals have a drop of water inside and when the kernals are heated that water turns to steam and pops open the popcorn!  So cool! So I gathered the kids and told them what I found out and we made some popcorn.  (There is also a popcorn song, so my son started singing.)  We talked about water and steam and we used the tea kettle so they could see the water go in and the steam come out.  We enjoyed eating our popcorn and the kids discussed how the popcorn pops.  

It was a fascinating science day and now I must go buy more vinegar.  I dropped the ball on always be prepared!

My husband to the rescue again! He went to the store and bought more vinegar.  When he returned we poured vinegar into a bottle, put some baking soda inside a balloon attached the balloon to the bottle and watched as the balloon inflated.  The kids were amazed!  After that we poured vinegar into the bottle and added baking soda and watched it fizz up and overflow.  They loved it and we did it many many times.  We also tried putting baking soda in the bottle first then vinegar.  It fizzed but wasn't the same effect as we were getting with the vinegar in the bottle first.



Baking soda and vinegar inflating balloon!

 We all had a fun day with science experiments.  At dinner we each take a turn saying what our favorite thing we did that day was.  My son said, "Doing science experiments with you mom." That made my heart smile.  I think we will be doing more experiments in the near future! Great boredom buster ideas too!