Edible Experiments You Can Do At Home With Your Kids
This is a guest post from Mothers Need
Do you want to turn play-time into a learning experience for your kids? You’ve come to the right place! Since kids are spending most of the time at home, please take this opportunity to have them learn moreover some fun science experiments. Below, we’ve listed a few science experiments you can do easily at home with your kids.
Homemade Rock Candy
Try this tasty science experiment with your kids to teach them about solute, solvents, and solutions. The Homemade Rock Candy experiment will teach your kids what a supersaturated solution is in particular and how crystals are formed.
What You’ll Need:
Cane sugar (3 cups)
Water (1 cup)
A heatproof container
A glass jar
Food coloring
Pencil
String
Wax paper
Experiment:
Dissolve the sugar and water in a heatproof container. Put the container in a microwave for 2-3 minutes. Take the container out and stir the solution. You might want to put the container back in the microwave for a few more minutes till the sugar dissolves completely in the water.
Once the sugar is completely dissolved, shift the contents into a glass jar and put food coloring. Tie a string around the middle of a pencil and cut the string to be slightly shorter than the glass jar. Dip the string in the solution once and take it out. Put the string on wax paper for some minutes. Once the glass jar is at room temperature, put the string back in the jar and sit for at least a week.
After a week, take the string out of the jar and watch what design the crystals form! And of course, a taste test is necessary.
Making Butter At Home
This is yet another yummy science experiment you can easily do with your kids at home while learning something too! Your kids can learn about the process of agitation and emulsification.
The agitation (mechanical) of churning causes the membrane around butterfat to break and results in the solidification of butterfat into butter.
Emulsification is the process of mixing two or more liquids. So when we break the butterfat membrane through mechanical agitation, the water and fat components of milk separate.
What You’ll Need:
Condiment cups with lids
A container for pouring off the buttermilk
Pasteurized heavy whipping cream
Experiment:
Fill the condiment cups half full with heavy whipping cream and secure the lid tightly.
Have your kids shake the cups horizontally. Make sure to keep the cups shaking at all times.
The heavy whipping cream will go through these stages: ·
It will start as a liquid sloshing against the cup walls
It will then become a solid—whipped cream
Finally, it will separate into both liquid and solid. The solid part will be butter, while the liquid part will be buttermilk.
Have your kids spread the butter on some toasted bread and enjoy your little science experiment!
Homemade Ice Cream
We saved this sweet treat for last as the perfect ending for a day of science experiments!
This sweet science experiment will teach your kids about the states of matter and how the states change due to temperature, the heat transfer process, and the lowering of freezing point with salt.
What You’ll Need:
Two zip-lock bags (a one-gallon one and a one-quart size one)
½ cup milk
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
½ cup of salt
Ice (8-10 cups)
Towels or gloves to protect hands
Experiment
Take the ½ cup of milk, sugar, and vanilla extract and mix them. Pour the mixture in the smaller zip-lock bag. Put in the ice cubes in the gallon zip-lock bag and put in salt.
Put the milk mixture zip-lock bag inside the ice one and seal the ice zip-lock bag. Now shake, shake, shake the bag till ice cream forms.
Enjoy the tasty treat with sprinkles on top!
Wrapping Up
Science is fun and oh-so-sweet! As we saw in the above experiments, you can have fun with your kids while having them learn something out of that experience.
Which one of these science experiments would you try with your kids? Let us know by sharing on our Facebook, Instagram or Twitter page!