psocoptera

Project: Will It Fizz?
Materials: muffin tin, flour, baking soda, water, vinegar, spoons, cups
Explanatory details: With some help, Junie spooned out flour into six of the muffin cups and baking soda into the other six. I added a little balsamic vinegar to the white vinegar so that it was visually distinct from water. Then I added water to flour, vinegar to flour, water to baking soda, and vinegar to baking soda. When we did it again, Junie helped with pouring the water, but I still did the vinegar.
How did it go: Pretty good! "Do it again!" The muffin tin set-up made it easy to repeat. The last time we did the baking soda-vinegar cup, it fizzed so much it overflowed onto the counter, which was exciting.
Things we talked about: Guessing whether each combination would fizz or not, whether it had the previous times, that fizziness is a gas coming out and root beer does the same thing.
What Junie got out of it: She obviously had *no idea* why we were doing all those other combinations if only one of them was going to do anything interesting, but it's been like two years since I laid out a properly controlled experiment in a well plate, so *I* found that satisfying ::grin::. She thought the fizzing was neat and then happily dumped leftover flour into leftover water for a bit and tried to scoop it out again, but then was like, "okay, okay, so where are the duck and the rock? let's do some real science here!" and is now happily taking the duck and the rock and the crayon in and out of a tub of water again. (She was still talking about it at bedtime yesterday - "rock sanks!" - but currently seems more interested in "duck's not out duck's in water" so sink-and-float is also apparently a good activity for opposites.)