Science Fair--March-April, 2013

This year the three oldest boys agreed (with a bit of, ummm, shall we say pressure from me) to do a science fair project.  The toughest part was finding something to do it on.  It seemed for awhile there that I was the only one excited about doing about 10 different projects.  However, once they cottoned on to the fact that I was not going to give up on this, they each chose something they were fairly interested in and then the excitement grew from there.  William came home from school saying he was curious to know if something could go from a solid to a gas without being a liquid first.  Great!  I thought, dry ice, here we come!!  He studied the rate of Sublimation of dry ice and how its affected by being in a liquid (hot and cold water), oil (hot and cold), and air (hot and room temp.)  Ryrie got interested in seeds, and studied germination in dark and light in three different environments--soil, water, and damp paper towel, and Owen at first wanted to study penguins, but then after getting some solid-liquid books out of the library for Will to look at, he got interested in seeing which liquid can make the best ice cream.  So we tried it with milk, root beer, orange juice, and...one more, which I can't remember right now.  He tried it two ways--in the blender and by hand using the shake method in two ziplock baggies.  Unfortunately I seem to have lost the pictures I took of their project boards!  They did a nice job typing up the info and decorating their boards.

seeds before germination

seeds long after germination--they survived while we were on our Utah trip, but I killed them when trying to transplant to the garden.  Amazingly, we grew one baby bean while in the cup!  Ryrie and I were most fascinated by the seed coats that come off the seeds as they grow into plants.  So cool!

After the experiment was done, Will suggested a "Potions" Class,  He and Ry dressed up in their Harry Potter gear and conducted class.  We had a lot of fun with that cooler full of dry ice pellets!  At first the kids were afraid of it, but they lost that fear pretty quickly!