Our last science experiment

Hey y'all,

So, school's out, school's out, teacher let the monkeys out! :)  We are officially done for the year.  We will do things throughout the summer, but nothing "official."  Molly already knows that she wants to do a research project about Barbie this summer and Colin wants to learn about race cars.  We will certainly be busy!  Our last week of school we learned about color.  This experiment was really cool!  We had three different "tests" because we weren't sure it was working.  

Our set up.  We used a cup of milk, dish soap and a couple drops of red, blue and yellow (the primary colors) food coloring.

We put the drops in the milk.

Then, in the middle, we added a drop of dish soap.  We thought this bowl was too big, because it didn't really mix the colors like it was supposed to, so we started over in a smaller bowl.

Same set up.

It didn't appear this one was working either, but instead of dumping it, we set it aside to see if it just needed time.

We decided to see if hand soap would work better than the dish soap.

Same set up.

It mixed more quickly.  We think we made a discovery.  Maybe the degreaser in the dish soap was effecting our outcome.

Here is the second bowl.  It's starting to mix a little bit more.

Here, you can see the soap on top of the milk.  See, soap will not mix with milk, it just spreads across.  This is supposed to disrupt the food coloring causing it to swirl and mix making a rainbow of color.

Molly recorded all of our findings.

The end.  But, we let them sit out for the next hour.

Later, we saw the rainbow.  It was really neat!

This one was darker, but cool too.

Isn't it pretty?

I never liked science through school.  I thought it was hard, boring and in many way, unimportant.  I do not want Molly and Colin to have the same opinion, especially about the last point.  Science is not only an important part of our every day lives, but I want them to be able to confidently defend their faith without science hindering them.  It's great that we are enjoying these experiments now and I am excited to learn with them in the future.

Until next time...