My six year old daughter often asks if we can do experiments. That is where the
bath fizzies were "born". And that got me thinking about what we could do with the plethora of cold air we have outside these last couple of weeks. We haven't seen more than 1 degree Fahrenheit in days with temperatures regularly dipping down to -15. It is bad when you have reached the point where you have to specify "above" or "below" zero when referring to temperature.
Anytime a child asks to do experiments, go for it. You cannot start of love of science, or math for that matter, early enough. And by experiment, I don't mean anything difficult, time consuming, or dangerous. Just something to get the kids thinking about how things work and asking questions.
For our first experiment we made ice cream. We took a metal mixing bowl and put in about 2 cups of heavy cream, 2 teaspoons of vanilla, a pinch of salt, and 1/2 cup white granulated sugar. I beat the mixture by hand with a whisk for a couple of minutes until it got a little frothy, just like making whipped cream. At the last minute I squeezed in some chocolate syrup, cause I am a purist like that... that and I love chocolate. Then we covered the bowl with plastic wrap and set it outside on the front porch. I went out and swirled it around a couple of times while it was chilling.
In about 2-3 hours we got a nice soft ice cream.
It was yummy but still pretty soft. More like a chocolate shake than a bowl of ice cream. That, however, did not stop us from eating it!
We then put the metal bowl back outside overnight. The next day we had a solid, scoopable ice cream.
There are many fancier and more well thought out ice cream recipes out there. But this was a fun project for my little budding scientist.
The second experiment we tried was to freeze water balloons. I have seen the picture on Pintrest enough times where they froze big balloons full of water and food coloring that I wanted to try it myself. Using my daughter's curiosity as a front, we gave it a go.
First a word of warning. This can be a big mess. You have to fill the balloons with water. And you need to put the food coloring in the balloon before filling with water. So if the balloon pops or springs a leak while filling with water, or carrying to the door, you will have colored water everywhere. This did not happen to us but it could have.
We put food coloring drops in three balloons, purple, blue, and green. And filled them with water. The balloons I had on hand are large party balloons but given my fear of the "big mess" and because they are designed for air or helium, not water, I did not fill them up very much. I would have done more but I dyed my fingers purple and am not very good at tying balloons, so three was enough.
We put the balloons outside in the snow, in the grass to freeze. Do not put the balloons on stone or cement or any walkway that might get stained by the food coloring. We have all stone and cement paver walkways so we put the balloons safely in the snow in the grass to prevent staining.
In the above picture you can see two of the three red balloons. The middle blue one popped before I could get the picture of the three balloons. I didn't take a picture of the unfrozen balloons when I first put them out because it was dark and below zero.
The next day when I went to remove the red balloon to reveal the colored ice spheres, I found that they were not completely frozen. There was a little pocket of water down underneath the ice sphere. So when the balloons were popped, this colored water spilled onto the snow. Again I am glad I didn't put them near the driveway. My daughter thinks they are super cool.
The third experiment we did has no pictures. But what we did was take a pitcher of water out into the dark cold night and throw the water into the air. It was about -15 degrees outside. The water froze into snow instantly causing a little mini-blizzard in the air before falling to the ground. No water hit the ground which is the coolest thing. Usually we have to wait until a couple of weeks in February for it to be cold enough. Not this year! We have done this trick for visiting family and friends many times. Their reactions are usually the same, "That is so cool! Can we go inside now?"
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Have some fun and try some experiments with your family.
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