Are you like Ada Twist, Scientist?

Over the last few weeks we have seen our friends become more and more curious about making potions and those potions making things happen. They started off wanting their potions to taste bad or change you into an animal of some sort but as the weeks have gone on the children have become more interested in their potions exploding. Last week I gave the children vinegar and baking soda so they could see a reaction and they loved it! Over and over they talked about how it was going to explode to the sky. So today I wanted to give them something that would give more of a reaction than vinegar and baking soda. We put our scientist brains to work!

We read the book Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty. In the book it talked about hypothesis and trying out different theories in order to answer our big questions. We then talked about explosions and came up with some different hypotheses on why an explosion happens.

FD: we need some thing big for a big explosion.

JD: it might need fire.

ZW: we need a lot of vinegar and baking soda!

I then introduced the children to an experiment called Elephant Toothpaste. We talked about all of the different ingredients and hypothesized what might happen when we mix them.

Here's the ingredients for elephant toothpaste:

Hydrogen Peroxide

Dry Yeast

Water

Dish soap

Food Coloring

2 of the ingredients were a little more unknown to us.

I asked the children what they thought hydrogen peroxide was and AC had a wonderful answer!

AC: you use it when you get a cut, it cleans it!

Then I asked the kids what dry yeast was and ZW had a fantastic answer for that too!

ZW: it's alive and you use it when you bake.

We then talked about what dry yeast does when you cook and focused on that it helps make bread rise.

I asked them if they had any hypotheses about what would happen when we added the ingredients together.

ZG: it's going to explode!

In the bottle we added peroxide, dish soap, and food coloring.

In the small bowls we added dry yeast to warm water and stirred it until it was all mixed together.

Then we added the dry yeast mixture to our peroxide mixture and watched to see what happened! Unfortunately there was a lot going on so I only got one video of the reaction but I got a bunch of pictures. The kids were so excited and you could hear the sweet laughter all over the playscape!

And of course we had to explore the aftermath!

The kids said,

"It's gooey."

"It was a bigger explosion than the vinegar and baking soda!"

"It's so soapy."

"It feels soft."

I asked the kids, "why did the liquid grow?"

ZW excitely yelled, "because of the yeast, it made it grow like the bread!"

Once everyone was finished playing I noticed FD continue to work in this space. She was determined to make her experiment continue to grow. She took liquid mixtures from the different trays on the table to add to her bottle and then stood back and watched.

Not much happened as she added liquid from her friends trays so she asked for more yeast and peroxide. She added the peroxide first, nothing happened. I asked why she thought nothing was happening? She said, "because I need more of that rice stuff (the dry yeast)." I gave her more yeast and she added it to her concoction.