Science fun: Lumpy Liquids

The last experiment we did was make quicksand out of corn starch and water.  That was pretty neat.  It looks like a liquid, but when you touch it in a bowl, it feels like a solid.  When you put a spoonful in your hand, it is a liquid, but if you roll it in a ball, it becomes a solid.  As soon as you stop rolling it, it becomes a liquid. 

You can find the experiment here:  Lumpy Liquids



Sam rolling her quicksand



Darla just stopped rolling her quicksand

and there it is a liquid...

This is copied from the website link:

Why does the cornstarch mixture behave like this?

Think of a busy sidewalk. The easiest way to get through a crowd of people is to move slowly and find a path between people. If you just took a running start and headed straight for the crowd of people, you would quickly slam into someone and you wouldn't get very far. This is similar to what happens in the cornstarch mixture. The solid cornstarch acts like a crowd of people. Pressing your finger slowly into the mixture allows the cornstarch to move out of the way, but tapping the mixture quickly doesn't allow the solid cornstarch particles to slide past each other and out of the way of your finger.


We use the term “viscosity” to describe the resistance of a liquid to flow. Water, which has a low viscosity, flows easily. Honey, at room temperature, has a higher viscosity and flows more slowly than water. But if you warm honey up, its viscosity drops, and it flows more easily. Most fluids behave like water and honey, in that their viscosity depends only on temperature. We call such fluids “Newtonian,” since their behavior was first described by Isaac Newton (when he wasn’t discovering the laws of gravity or developing the calculus). The cornstarch mixture you made is called “non-Newtonian” since its viscosity also depends on the force applied to the liquid or how fast an object is moving through the liquid.


Other examples of non-Newtonian fluids include ketchup, silly putty, and quicksand. Quicksand is like the cornstarch mixture: if you struggle to escape quicksand, you apply pressure to it and it becomes hard, making it more difficult to escape. The recommended way to escape quicksand is to slowly move toward solid ground; you might also lie down on it, thus distributing your weight over a wider area and reducing the pressure. Ketchup is the opposite: its viscosity decreases under pressure. That’s why shaking a bottle of ketchup makes it easier to pour.

Science fun: Layered Liquids

We went to Darla & Sam's house while Ryne was in speech class to do some science experiments.  She did layered liquids and quick sand. 

You can find the experiments here: Layered Liquids 

The first experiment we tried to mix water & oil.  They put food coloring in the water so you could easily tell the two liquids apart.

They layered 5 liquids in experiment number two.  They layered honey, dish soap, water, alcohol and oil.  After they were layered, added some honey to see if it would sink to the bottom.  It was neat watching it go down and pull the soap with it a little.  Adding more water was the neatest.  It hit the honey layer and bounced back up beneath the oil.  When all items were stirred, everything except the oil mixed.



The word “miscibility” describes how well two substances mix. Oil and water are said to be “immiscible,” because they do not mix. The oil layer is on top of the water because of the difference in density of the two liquids. The density of a substance is the ratio of its mass (weight) to its volume. The oil is less dense than the water and so is on top.



As soon as Ashley got there, she put her Pooh puzzle together.

Second experiment:  Put 1/4 cup honey in glass

Add 1/4 cup dish soap

Add 1/4 cup red colored water

Add 1/4 cup (green) wintergreen smelling alcohol...who knew that existed. 

then add 1/4 cup oil

Look at all the layers. 
You can see the honey layer, soap layer, the alcohol and water mixed layer, and the oil layer on the top

Close up of all the layers.

Peyton's drawing of what he saw.

Add some water to see if it mixes.  That looked pretty neat. ;)

This is copied from the website link:


Why do the liquids stay separated?


Can you think of several ways that the liquids in the glass are different? Try to describe some properties that differ in each of the liquids in the glass.


One property that is different in all of the liquids is color. Another property unique to each liquid is thickness (viscosity).


The property of the liquids that is responsible for the layering effect is density. Can you guess what the relationship is between the density of a liquid and its position in the glass?


Another property that keeps the liquids separate is that some of them are immiscible liquids, in other words they do not mix with each other. As you proved in the first experiment, oil and water are immiscible liquids. On the other hand, water and rubbing alcohol are miscible and will mix with each other. Water and the dishwashing liquid will also mix.

Stir up the liquids in the glass and watch what happens to the layers. Have any of the layers mixed (are they miscible in each other)? Wait a few minutes and look again. Have any of the other liquids separated?

Monet, Degas, Renoir...learning about Impressionism

I saw someone use this book on another blog and reserved it from the library.  This book is great.  It has learning opportunities and great painting and craft ideas.  The author is Joyce Raimondo and she has about 5 other books covering other art periods in this Art Explorer series.  I definitely recommend them.

I have had Peyton paint two pictures out of the book so far.We first made a color pallet with using only the 3 prime colors and white (red, yellow & blue).  We mixed those 3 colors to make the other colors for the picture.  That was fun.

The first painting was done to learn some of the strokes (he just wanted to do his own thing, but I tried to persuade him to do the strokes.  He used the same color for water and the sky, so it all kind of blends in. ;)  The second picture is to mimic pointelism.  He drew the outline of his picture and then painted it with the tip of a q-tip.  He got bored doing that after a while.  I finished it for him...doing the sky...yeah, it did get boring after a while, so I put 8 q-tips together and quickly got the sky done.





Our color pallet & Peyton painting his Monet.  He is painting clouds and rain. 
He painted big waves ttoo (it's hard to see that though)



My painting is on the top of the screen.  It was kind of fun. ;)



Can you tell what it is?  It's a few airplanes with missiles or something.  But they are commercial airplanes because his passengers are drinking coffee. ;)



Learning to write Chinese

Peyton has been on a kick to learn about China.  So instead of learning about the planned Egypt...we are learning about China.  He is getting a kick out of trying to write Chinese.  I don't understand Chinese much, so it's as foreign to me as it is to him, and it's hard to teach something that is foreign to you, but I try.  We read a story from Story of the World about Ancient Egypt.  It was about a boy and his father who lived on a farm and worked in rice fields.  It was a nice little story.  He colored a picture relating to it and then found a website that showed you how to draw some Chinese characters and he tried to draw them.

The computer screen is showing how to draw the character (it shows it in motion)

Peyton copies the character and writes it on the white board.  The only character I know on the board is the one on the very top...that is the character for person. :)

We have been reading some stories from this book to learn about Ancient China.  The first story was about how silk was 'invented'.  The Chinese kept it a secret for a very long time.  They get silk from silkworms who like to eat the leaves of mulberry trees.  They have to feed the worms every 30 minutes to fatten them up.  Oh what a fun job that would be. :)

Experimenting with fire, vinegar & baking soda - oooohhhh

We went over to Sam's house today to do some experiments. Ryne has therapy from 10:30-12:15, so I went there during his therapy and left when it was time to pick him up. Sam & Peyton did 3 experiments that taught them about CARBON DIOXIDE.  The experiments were taken from the book below. :)

There is vinegar and a little water in the bottle.  There is baking soda in the paper towel that Sam is putting in the bottle.  Notice Darla is ready to put the balloon over the bottle opening.

The reaction makes the balloon fill with air...this balloon had a hole in it



So we used another balloon.  Cool, huh?  Peyton wanted porcupine hair today...

The pictures below are of the second experiment

Get a plate and put some water on it...put a little candle on the plate and let they pyromaniac-8-year old girl light it ;)

Quickly cover the candle with a jar and watch the flame go up

then out...and watch the water get sucked into the glass and see the candle float in the water.  If the water was dyed, it would be easier to see, but the candle is floating.

These are pictures from the third experiment

Add about 3TB of baking soda in a dish

have the pyro strike the match

hand the vinegar to the boy

pour the vinegar over the baking soda

Watch the vinegar rise above the fire and extinguish it...just like a fire extinguisher

and the balloon from the 1st experiment is still filled with air.  Pretty cool, huh?

Thanks for hosting, Darla! :)

Peyton meets impressionism

I saw on another blog a few books to read on learning about impressionism.  I thought there were some good ideas.  I tried to get Peyton to paint with his fingers by making lots of dots to create an image...yeah, he said "but that's too messy, mom".  He gets THAT from his dad, not me.  :)

We read the book Katie Meets the Impressionist.  It's a very cute book about a little girl who goes to a museum and learns about some paintings from the impressionist period by actually going into the paintings herself and learning about the family members and the painter.  It covers 3 painters.  Renoir, Monet & Degas.

Learn about Monet, Renoir and Degas

So I had Peyton separate a bunch of little balls from play-doh and make an image putting all the little balls together.  He was tired of making little balls, so I helped him.  

Here is Peyton's image made of little dots of play-doh...he made a playground set (the yellow is a bench, the blue thing with a yellow dot is a dog, the magenta on the left is a slide with a child coming down it (people are blue), middle is a swing set and on the right is monkey bars.

Next week we will be doing an actual painting using a lot of dots.

Fieldtrip Friday: Hooks Airport

We went to Hooks Airport for our fieldtrip on Friday.  It is a small airport and it was only about 7 minutes from my house.  Nothing is ever that close for anything we do. :)  It was a lot of fun.  There were 100 people scheduled to go (including children).  I don't know how many were there, but there were a lot of families there.  I got to see a few mom's I had not seen since last semester. 

We are standing in front of the airplane they all sat in

The instructor requested that the kids try to be quiet since people were taking classes inside...Ryne saw the airplane and freaked out.  So much for quiet.  It took him until the field trip was almost over to actually go in an airplane.  They were small airplane's.  All the kids got to sit in an airplane and play with the steering wheel and a few other gadgets.  Then they got to go inside and play on the simulators.  Someone was managing the simulators to manage the weather conditions.  They of course made it clear for the children. ;)  Peyton crashed the plane a few times and then had to hand the wheel off to another child.  Ashley and Ryne played on the simulator as well.

After playing on the planes and playing on the simulator, everyone had a picnic lunch out by the pond.  When we first sat down to eat, some ducks waddled over our way to beg for some food.  Peyton mentioned that none of them were panting (like our duck friend at Ryne's school), so they didn't deserve any bread.  LOL!  After eating, they went and played down by the pond.  There was a nutria (a decent size water rat with long orange teeth) hiding under a little cave area under a tree and all the kids were trying to make it come out.  *shakes head* 

Right before we left (I was one of the last 3 families to leave), Jacob McMindes found a little turtle.  Peyton went to check it out.  His mom let him take it home.  They have a pond in their backyard.  It was a fun day.  I think we will go back there to do some nature studies at the pond area.  It was very well shaded, and Ryne loves watching airplanes (even though they freak him out a little). :)



Ashley playing pilot

Peyton getting out of the plane when his turn was over.

A group photo.  Ashley and Ryne couldn't decide if they wanted to be in the picture.  Ashley walked herself on over to me in the stroller.

What!  Ryne ACTUALLY got IN the plane!

Playing on the simulator

This is a Muscovy duck (you can tell because of the red on it's face)...they were thankfully not aggressive like the ones we visit at the pond by Ryne's school where he gets speech therapy.  They waddled over and stared at us and when they realized we weren't giving them anything, they waddled away. ;)

Peyton feeding the ducks at the pond

Ryne playing in the pond.

'Come here nutria, come here...come on, come on, come here...'

Peyton with Jimmy Taylor and Jacob McMindes.  Jacob found the turtle in the shallow area of the pond.