Skip to main content

States of Matter (or Making a Glorious Mess)

It started off as a lesson about touch.


Theo's meant to be looking at the five senses this week, you see, so we've had a bit of fun with tasting food while blindfolded, and guessing the smells.  Today was the sense of touch, so I thought, "Ah yes, those touchy-feely boxes." 

Then I thought, "How about jelly?" 

Then I thought, "Gels.  Foams.  Aerosols.  All sorts of fun stuff!"

And quite frankly, if having a chemistry degree doesn't mean you teach your kids about colloids and viscosity by the age of 10, then what is the point?

So for colloids, we had green jelly, blue shower gel, shaving foam and yoghurt.  (Is yoghurt a colloid?  I'm pretty sure it is.)  Otherwise known as lots of lovely gloop. 

If you missed that bit of your education, a colloid is basically one state of matter dispersed in another one.  So you can have a solid mixed with a liquid, which gives you something like shower gel, jelly, or yoghurt; or liquid mixed with gas, which gives you shaving foam, whipped cream, or whisked egg whites.  Most things that are kinda gloopy are probably colloids.  This website gives a pretty good explanation.


Powders are another interesting one.  All the tiny bits are definitely solid, but because they can flow over each other like the molecules do in a liquid, you can pour a powder a bit like you pour a liquid.

(You can also explode some powders quite nicely, but I think we'll stick to watching YouTube videos for that experiment!)

We had flour, salt demerara sugar and custard powder for a nice range of particle sizes, and talked about whether they felt soft or gritty or squeaky (that was the custard powder).


And then we had viscous liquids.  That's black treacle, golden syrup, olive oil and water.  Viscous is one of my favourite words.  It means thick and sticky.  Viscosity is the measure of how viscous something is.  Treacle has the highest viscosity here, and water the lowest, and we talked about if a liquid got really really thick and sticky, it would pretty much be a solid.


Of course, after all that, they said, "Can we mix it all together?"

And I said, "Sure, why not!"

So we had this:

And this:

And finally these, which you'd almost think were edible if you didn't know they were composed of shower gel, black treacle, cornflour and shaving foam.


After that we melted chocolate and coconut oil (solid into liquid transition) and made these, which are, in fact, edible, if you don't mind all the sugar balls getting stuck in your teeth.


And after that I had to wash sticky gloop off every bowl and spoon in the house, and get the boys to change their T-shirts.  But it was worth it to hear them say, "That was the best homeschooling day ever!"

As long as no one says, "Mum, can we do it all again tomorrow?"

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Enthusiasm and cynicism

Some while ago I heard a sermon on the story of Zacchaeus. I forget what the point of the sermon was - usually for this Bible passage it's something about Jesus saving everyone, even the unlikely people. But I remember wondering, did Zacchaeus really give all that money away? Image by Alexa from Pixabay You may remember the tale: Zacchaeus is a corrupt government official who is rather short. When Jesus arrives in town, Zacchaeus wants to get a look at him. So he climbs a tree to see over other people's heads. However, Jesus spots him and tells him to get out of the tree and go cook Jesus some dinner. I assume Jesus phrased it a little more nicely than that, because Zacchaeus is delighted, and moreover, promises to change his entire lifestyle. "Half of my possessions I give to the poor," he declares with the enthusiasm of the instant convert, "and anyone I've defrauded, I'll pay back four times over." The surrounding crowd are the cynics: Jesus, th...

Limestone Way: The Three B's

This walk on the Limestone Way takes me to three villages starting with B: Ballidon, Brassington, and Bradbourne.   Parwich to Brassington The weather forecast says it's fine, but as I walk out of Parwich some light rain starts, which persists for most of the walk. It's not enough to make me properly wet. Parwich sits in a large bowl; the kind of landscape where you can see where you're heading, where you came from, and the next hill you are going to have to climb. The area has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years .  A short climb up a field takes me to Highway Lane, which I follow down again, and then bear left across the fields to Ballidon. I can see the chimney of Ballidon Quarry, and a building which looks like an old chapel. I assume it must now be a private house, but when I get there, I discover that this is All Saints church, now in the care of the Friends of Friendless Churches. What a nice surprise! I'm intrigued by the Creed and Ten Com...

Working on sunshine

Freeeee electricity!  No, seriously.  This guy came and knocked on the door one day, and I don't usually pay any more attention to random strangers trying to sell me something at the door than you probably do, but I guess he must have said "free" enough times to penetrate my consciousness, so I found myself agreeing to have someone check our house's suitability for solar panels.  And another guy turned up, and measured; and another one, and we signed; and a few more, and put up scaffolding and panels and meter boxes and cable; and suddenly, if we're careful, we can avoid paying for any electricity during daylight hours, because it's all generated right up there above our heads. Of course, we have the British government to thank for this, which probably means we're paying for it somewhere along the line.  The Department for Energy and Climate Change (presumably it's actually against climate change rather than for it, although you never know) has...