Category Archives: Experimenting

Preparing (and sharing) Science Supplies

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In my experience, the biggest challenge related to science lessons is doing the experiments. But we can do a few things to increase our motivation and eliminate obstacles. For example, we can gather all the supplies needed for the whole term (or the whole year) in advance. After all, when the baking soda is nowhere to be found, or mom forgot to order the magnets, the lesson is over before it starts!

I’ve invited Emily Kiser, my co-host on A Delectable Education Podcast and homeschool organizer extraordinaire, to share her method for gathering and storing supplies. She has four children and, therefore, will use these supplies repeatedly for several years. But beyond that, she has found a way to share the cost and the blessing with others.

Emily originally shared this tip with our ADE Patreons, where she often posts tips for organizing everything from her planning notebook to her kids’ paper stuff to her school cabinet. I hope her ideas here will help you prepare for the science experiments your kids will do in the upcoming school year.

A few years ago, Morgan Conner of @CMintheNaturalState made Science Supply boxes to go along with each of Nicole’s science guides, and she “checks them out” to the members of her CM Reading Group, just like we check out Five in a Row unit boxes to our library members! I thought at that time it was a brilliant idea and wanted to use her idea for my own Natural History Club. We keep our group pretty small since we all have 4 children, so there are just 4 families–20 people make a lot of noise walking down a trail, but that’s another story. As my eldest will be in Form 2 next year, and my sister’s eldest is in his second year of Form 2, I offered to gather the supplies and assemble the boxes this summer.  Continue reading →

Grow [LARGE] Alum Crystals

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A quick search on the internet provided me with several sets of instructions for growing alum crystals, but none of them worked the way we had hoped. We kept ending up with big clusters of crystals, but not a single big crystal. After a little trial and error, however, we figured out how to grow some big ones!

What You Need:
alum (from the spice isle of your grocery store)
water
2 jars

What You Do:
DAY 1

  1. Pour 1/2 cup of hot tap water into a clean jar.
  2. Slowly stir in 2 1/2 tablespoons of alum, a little at a time, until it stops dissolving. You likely won’t need the whole amount – just enough to saturate the water.
  3. Loosely cover the jar with a coffee filter or paper towel to keep dust out. 
  4. Allow the jar to sit undisturbed overnight, or even for a couple days.

DAY 2

  1. The next day (or a couple days later,) pour off the alum solution from the first jar into another clean jar. (Do not pour the tiny crystals in with the liquid, yet.)
  2. You will see several small alum crystals at the bottom of the jar and along the sides. These are the ‘seed’ crystals which you will use to grow big crystals.
  3. Pick 1-3 of the largest ‘seed’ crystals and place them in the bottom of your fresh jar of alum solution.

EVERY FEW DAYS

  1. Repeat part 2, moving your growing seed crystals to the fresh jar. 
  2. Pick off any tiny crystal that have affixed themselves to your big crystal.
  3. If the alum water gets too low, make more solution and add it to the jar. (Wait until it cools.)
  4. Don’t be concerned if it seems like your crystal is not growing properly on one side – just turn it over and it will repair itself. 

When it is the size you want, store it in an airtight container.

You can see the size difference between our tiny seed crystal (left), and our finished crystal (right).

These crystals have gotten cloudy due to being exposed to the air for a couple months.

I hope you try this out and let me know how it worked!

Related:
Special Study – Minerals
Natural History Rotation

To Use the Scientific Method is Natural

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 One of my children began reading a Christian Liberty Nature Reader this week.  So far I highly recommend this for early readers. One of the difficulties with a Charlotte Mason education is the necessity of finding very good beginning readers.  Our children have been hearing such high quality books from such an early age, so early readers have the potential to bore them. Thankfully there are good readers available, and it turns out that this is one of the gems. An added bonus is that it has a nature study focus.

The first chapter told how a mother Mud Wasps set up each of her eggs in a walled in nest. She puts several spiders within the nest, so the baby will have food when it hatches.  In the book there is a little sketched picture of the nest that really isn’t very clear, but my daughter found the description very interesting.

The morning following this first reading, she and I ran an errand, and out of the blue she made this sound of awe and disbelief.  I had missed whatever she saw, and had to wait until she could gather herself to explain. She spoke with amazement in her voice. “I can’t believe it.  I just saw it. There was a Mud Wasp nest on the wall in that tunnel. Will you go back?” I wish you could have heard the awe in her tone. It was like it was a gift set out just for her.  Of course, I went back and there is was. Just like she said.  I’m not sure I would have known what I was looking at, after all, the sketch had not been all that clear, but she could tell.

Once we returned home she looked up images of Mud Wasps nest, and sure enough, that is exactly what it was.

Now comes the good part. Sure, that was a pretty good part, but this is the science-y-blog good part.  After making these observations, she began asking questions: How does that mother Mud Wasp catch those spiders without getting stuck in the web? Does she have some kind of oil on her feet so she doesn’t stick, or does she swoop in like a helicopter, but not actually land? How does she collect several spiders and wall them in without them getting away? There were holes in those nests – is that from the baby wasps getting out? Are they little when they are born?

That right there is what we call the formulation of a question. (Well, several questions!)

A little later she said, “She might sting them, the spiders.” And another child said, “To paralyze them maybe.”

And there’s a hypothesis!

I was so good, (if I do say so myself,) because I casually responded by saying, “That’s a good hypothesis.” It’s so great when we can slip in correct terminology. Unfortunately, it requires knowing the correct terminology, and it’s better to say nothing than say the wrong thing, but I think I pulled it off this time.

So far there has been no testing or analysis, but just give it time!

I’ve been thinking lately that we really do a lot more experimenting than we realize, and if we are naturally experimenting, we are likely naturally using the scientific method.