Saturday Science Links: Playing with fire

It’s Chemistry month here at the Makice household, and that means we’re watching Bill Nye, playing with fire, making slime, attempting rock candy, and apparently drinking a lot of sugar water in the process. We’ve enjoyed several internet sites this week and here they are:

Carter and I prefered to ignore the directions and instead play around with the controls. We heated and reheated the water, froze it, reheated it, until Carter determined it would not let him get it to absolute zero and thus lost interest.

Carter’s been making “Element Cards” like baseball cards only nerdier. A great resource has been the book Periodic Table. Another is the Periodic Table of Elements where you can take your time learning about the individual elements- click on the element of your choice to see more photographs, history, properties and even images you can spin.

We haven’t tried this one yet, but it looks fun. I plan on trying it before showing them the video:

Kids Magic Trick – The most popular videos are here

Our top chemistry moment was not on the internet, but found in the book Science Magic Tricks. I think we liked it most because it allowed us to play with fire, and who doesn’t enjoy a good bout of pyromania? In preparation, we carefully brought out to the patio rubbing alcohol, water, a measuring cup, two candles and matches.

At first, we simply played around with dropping rubbing alcohol on a candle (we used lanterns around the candle in order to keep the kids hands far enough away) and watching the resulting flare. Then we graduated to the “magic washcloth.” We measured out the water and alcohol and carefully soaked the washrag, placed it in a metal bowl and dropped a lit match on it. Using tongs, I lifted the flaming rag out of the bowl to show all of us that while fire raged around the cloth, the cloth remained unsinged. Very cool.