Saturday, August 11, 2012

Science Experiment - Can an Egg Bounce?

Although we are using Beyond Little Hearts for His Glory by Heart of Dakota as our main curriculum, I tweak and add on quite a bit. Fridays are our science experiment days, and we are using the book: 101 Cool Science Experiments.

The very first experiment involved seeing if we could bounce a raw egg. The experiment was very simple. All you have to do is soak one raw egg in a glass of water and one raw egg in a glass of white vinegar. The book said to leave it for 7 days and observe how it changes over the week. After 7 days, see if you can bounce it without it breaking.

Here is a pic of the 1st egg soaking in vinegar. The shell will bubble and slowly start to turn into a soft skin rather than a calcified shell.


We ended up having to do this twice because 7 days ended up being too long. One gentle throw and the egg exploded and stunk up the whole back yard. So we tried again, this time leaving the egg in the vinegar for 4 days. We had much better results. She was able to gently bounce it 5-6 times before it broke.

Here is a pic of the egg after 7 days in the vinegar. As you can see, it's virtually see through and thin. It did not bounce.


Here is a link to a video of her bouncing the 2nd egg, which was neither as soft or translucent as the 1st egg. She was a little nervous that we'd have another failure, so she starts off a little slowly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFW8ChFXSQU

After we conducted the experiment, she completed her science experiment notebooking sheet that I printed from somewhere online. I spent one whole night printing out different notebooking pages, and for the life of me can't remember where I located this one. I like this one because it's simple and has a place for illustrating the experiment. We are gearing up to grow some crystals soon, but that's going to take a couple of weeks from start to finish. Happy homeschooling!