Crazy Science Day

Day 2 of “Winter Camp Rick” was “Crazy Science Day.”  We got a much slower start this morning as the kids were happy to play at home together for a while before we started in on the experiments.

Our first project was making rock candy. First Reagan and Alex had to measure and cut kitchen twine and then tie it onto a pencil to suspend in the liquid. 

Next, they measured out sugar and water and dissolved all of the sugar into the water.

 

Then we poured the water into the glass jars and let them sit all afternoon.

 

By the end of “Crazy Science Day” we had made rock candy.

Pretty cool and yummy.

 

Our next experiment was to see if you really could cook salmon in the dishwasher. 

 

The kids each seasoned their fillets, topped them with lemons and wrapped them tightly in foil.

We then put them in the top rack of the dishwasher and ran it on a normal wash cycle with heated drying.

Rumor had it that you can cook the salmon and wash your dishes at the same time, but we weren’t quite that daring.  Alex thought the salmon would come out all watery; Reagan was worried it might be a little soapy, but they both thought that it would be cooked.

 

The end result: the salmon was cooked perfectly, all flaky and delicious.

 

We ate every morsel.

While the salmon cooked, we read Dr. Seuss's book Bartholomew and the Ooblek. 

Then we made our own ooblek, which was just as green and sticky as it was in the book. 

Next up: blowing up balloons with a mixture of vinegar and baking soda.  The kids weren’t quite sure how mixing these two together could blow up the balloon, but were delighted to see if it could be done. 

Our balloons didn’t blow up that big and we decided that next time we tried it, we would need to use more of each of the ingredients to get the balloons to blow up bigger.

After that we made our own lava lamps using oil, water, food coloring and alka seltzer tablets. 

Alex declared it the coolest thing ever. 

Carter made his own fun with a pot holder.

Then we moved on to making our own slime and it was quite slimy and delightful.

 

I think Gracie could’ve played with it all day.

Our last project was making trees that magically grew out of newspaper. 

 

We taped sheets of newspaper together, rolled it up tight, cut it down halfway and like magicians, the kids pulled out trees taller than themselves. 

To top off the “best day ever” according to all the kids, was dinner at the Rainforest Cafe where we sadly met Greg and Linda to return Gracie and Alex and end “Winter Camp Rick.”  Chances are, there will be another “Crazy Science Day” in our future.