A Very Pretty Experiment...

We love putting bursts of colour around our home. One of Phoebe's favourite past-times is wandering around the garden, cane flower basket over her arm, carefully holding her scissors by the blades, looking for just the right flowers for all of her arrangements. Little smiles pop up all over the house.
We had these 'surprise' Calla Lillies shoot up along the eastern side of our house, after re-locating a huge patch of Rhubarb, lest the painter trample it all, whilst painting our house. [we've finally decided on colours and have gone with a charcoal grey for the main timbers, a dirty white for all the window surrounds and other trims and a Brick Red roof - so still with that country solid strong colour and white demarcation - just not the verdant green I'd originally had in mind!!] Ok - so I digress...so the Calla Lillies artfully placed in the retro milk bottles and holder were looking pretty cool (well, we thought!).
And then an idea... 'cos they were kinda plain...let's add colour to the water!
SO the food colouring came out - with suitable protections in place for clothes, precious ancient terrazzo surface on kitchen bench, etc - and the experiment began.
What we did was create the 3 Primary colours straight and then the 3 Secondary colours from proportions of drops. Very simple, very effective - and a neat home school lesson for Phoebe where she made colour using particular numbers of drops. So we counted as she droppered the colours. Since the instructions on the food colouring packaging for how to create the secondary colours were in different proportions, I worked them out so we would get the same dilution. And then I thought of the extra lessons in the future - adding in the concept of proportion and eventually teach Phoebe how to do this herself. And then another time we could work the tonal concept of colour - with less and less number of drops for a weaker dilution, etc... We love home schooling - and it is still, technically, the school holidays - why oh why do we need a holiday from learning ;-) ?? It doesn't stop in our home!

...and the answer is...

...ORANGE JUICE!

We were certain after all our talking about acidity and it's effects that it would either be the Coca-cola (which, by the way, was purchased specifically for the purpose of this Scientific Experiment!!) or the Baking Soda/Vinegar mix.

And the second most effective was...milk! Go figure!

We learned was it was fun to devise a way to find out the answer to a puzzling question right here in the house and to lead ourselves in the direction of the resources we'd need to find out.
We also learned some more about waiting and being patient for the reaction to occur (on it's own!).

How do we clean these old moneys, Mum?

A few weeks ago, our wonderful neighbour, Pete, gave Phoebe a collection of his old coins from various travels...interesting...And then on Sunday Phoebe bagan examining them, sorting them, spreading them out, looking at the pretty designs, only they were all covered with...verdis gris and general 'gunk'. So, what to do? Mummy, how do we clean these "moneys"? has now led to our first Science Experiment...Cleaning Coins.We decided on a mixture of Baking Soda and White Vinegar, which we know is good at cleaning all sorts of dirt off all sorts of surfaces. Then, we had a visit from Uncle Ray - he's a geologist and knows plenty about Science! He and Aunty Raema suggested coca-cola and orange juice. And then we considered milk as an alkali liquid to see what might happen with that and then as with all science experiments, you really need to have that thing called a control - so we chose water.