Food science experiments

We have had some great experimental sessions this month, in and out of the kitchen. Here's a picture of one easy-to-duplicate science demonstration:

Having combined lots of baking soda and vinegar in a tank—thereby releasing a great deal of carbon dioxide—we saw that if you blow bubbles over the top of the tank, those that drift into the tank wind up resting, stationary, on a cushion of carbon dioxide. It creates a great chance to observe the bubbles more closely than is usually possible. In our discussion afterward, the children did an incredibly impressive job of applying their minds and their previous experience to the question of why, when two bubbles are joined together, the smaller bubble seems to push into the larger bubble. They figured out the right answer with hardly any help from me. Ask your child why it happens that way!

This morning, Zachary Williams came into the school (with our own Jesse, his co-mad scientist), and amazed us all by demonstrating electrolysis, separating out the hydrogen and oxygen gases in water. The children were fascinated, and so was I. After we'd finished with the electrolysis itself, Zach went on to demonstrate what happens when a match is inserted into a bottle full of hydrogen, or into a jar full of carbon dioxide. We have a melty soda pop bottle that we're keeping in the room as a souvenir. Don't try this one without supervision, anyone! (Full directions for the experiment, and safety tips, will be available on Jesse's blog: A Medley of Mathematics.)

And, this afternoon, we began an experiment for which we will need chicken bones. So, I picked up a couple of chickens from Whole Foods, and the children were responsible for extracting the bones. We're still working on it, but we had a lot of fun getting our hands dirty and seeing the inside of a bird this afternoon!

Exquisite Corpse

There's a great writing exercise called "Exquisite Corpse" that the children and I have been having fun with in class recently. It's a group storytelling game, in which each child adds a sentence to a story. The sentences are written on a sheet of paper... but the catch is that the paper is folded down so that you can only see the single sentence just before your own. All earlier parts of the story are hidden, and that one sentence is all each student has to go on in understanding what the story is about. The results, of course, are often hilarious and unexpected.

After our first round of Exquisite Corpse, we took some time to discuss what makes a complete and proper sentence—according to our class's version of the game, each contribution must be a complete sentence. I copied one of the twelve stories we'd created onto the board and we all examined it, piece by piece, to see whether it was truly composed of complete sentences. The check marks on the left side of the blackboard indicate proper sentences. The checks on the right side of the board indicate whether or not each sentence follows logically from the one before—even if it bears no relation to previous sentences that the author couldn't see.

Once there was a man named Fran, who wanted to fly to Japan.

He did not have enough money and he needed a new job.

So he went to a school where people studied bones.

The school was a giant skeleton.

It was the skeleton of Elmo the stupid dragon.

The town took them.

Or, more accurately, the town stole them.

Then they sold them and spent all the money on apple pie.

They hated apple pie more than anything.

So they flew to space and ate cheese.

The End.

As you can see, we have some fun with these!

(For the curious, the name "Exquisite Corpse" apparently derives from an early round of the game, played by members of the Surrealist movement.)