Mad Science

My kids LOVE participating in the school science (or STEM) fair every year, even though I always dread it. Not the experiment part, but coming up with an idea and then doing all the project board requirements. Plus, trying to explain why things happen the way they do is hard cause I hardly understand it myself, let alone trying to explain it to younger minds. At any rate, we survived another year, which is amazing considering Kendall and Brooklyn were sick all week and out of school.

For her project, Kendall partnered with her girlfriend Victoria to test density in a variety of liquids. They called their experiment "Rainbow Density" since all the liquids stacked up and looked (or were supposed to look) like a rainbow in the end. This was fun and interesting to see how the more dense liquids, like honey and maple syrup, were pulled down in the glass jar, while the less dense liquids, like water, dish soap, lamp oil, were at the top.

Once we "stacked" the various density liquids, we dropped objects into the liquids to see how far down they would go in the liquids...

The ping pong ball didn't go through much more than the lamp oil, whereas the bolt went all the way through the honey to the bottom of the glass jar. The dice, cherry tomato, popcorn kernels, and beads were somewhere in the middle. Can you see any of the objects? ...

From start to finish it took THREE hours. You can see the colorful layers of liquids on the poster and the various objects we dropped in and where they settled in the liquids...

At the school science fair looking pretty legit in their lab coats and gloves...

Here is how the liquids were supposed to look in the end. Ours didn't quite get to this level of perfection when we tried it, but we got the general idea...

Brooklyn partnered with her friend and neighbor Emily. They made foaming slime and the amazing and absolutely wonderful thing about their project is... they did the WHOLE THING ALL BY THEMSELVES. Neither I nor Emily's mom did anything to help other than take the pictures of the girls' making the slime. I'm so proud of them for doing it themselves! Unfortunately, the day of the science fair, Emily got sick and couldn't make it, so Brooklyn had to represent their project alone.

This wasn't part of the science fair, but Brooklyn had to do a 3-D representation of our solar system for a school project and this is how it turned out. She used playdough to make each of the planets, put them on the play dough containers and suck in the facts using skewers...