Top ten science experiments to do with kids

Science week is nearly upon us, so it’s time for some fun science experiments at home that can satisfy the most curious of minds. Here are ten tried and tested experiments that you can do with the kiddies using everyday household items, some you can even eat – bonus!

All of these experiments should be supervised by a friendly adult as some contain lit flames, boiling water and acids.

1) Orange Fizz

• Teaches Kids About: Chemistry
• Difficulty Level: Easy
• Messiness Level: Low

Materials:

• An Orange or Clementine
• 1/2 Teaspoon Baking Soda

Instructions:

1. Cut the orange into slices or peel into segments
2. Dip a slice or segment into the baking soda
3. Take a bite! As you chew, it should start to bubble in your mouth

How does it work?
When acids and alkaline mix, you get some exciting chemical reactions. Oranges and other citrus fruits contain citric acid. It is a safe acid to eat and touch, and it’s what gives oranges, lemons, and limes their sourness. Baking soda is an alkaline base, the opposite of an acid. It’s also safe to eat, but doesn’t taste very good on its own, and will give you a tummy ache if you eat a lot of it. As the citric acid and baking soda mix, it makes millions of carbon dioxide bubbles, the same gas you breathe out, and the same one that makes fizzy pop so fizzy.

2) Snow Fluff

• Teaches Kids About: Chemical Reactions
• Difficulty Level: Medium
• Messiness Level: Medium

Materials:

• 1 cup corn flour
• 1 cup shaving cream
• Food colouring (optional)

Instructions:

1. Pour the cup of corn starch into a large bowl. Use a spoon to scoop the shaving cream on top of it. Put 5-10 drops of food colouring on top. Stir to mix.
2. When the mixture looks like grated cheese, use your hands to squish the mixture even more.

3. Pretty soon the shaving cream and corn starch will form a ball, about the same texture as dough.
4. If your mixture is really wet and sticky after mixing, it needs a little more corn starch. If it won’t stick together and falls into pieces, add a little more shaving cream. There is no fixed amount, it is trial and error.
5. Try sculpting snow angels, snowmen, or make a tiny snow fort!

How does it work?
The tiny pieces of corn flour get mixed into the shaving cream and suspended in the mixture. Shaving cream is made of tiny bubbles, and the surface tension on the surface of the bubbles helps ‘float’ the corn flour particles when the two mix.

3) Butter Fingers

• Teaches Kids About: Chemistry
• Difficulty Level: Medium
• Messiness Level: Low

Materials:

• 8oz screw-top plastic container or mason jar
• 1/2 cup of whipping cream
• 1/4 teaspoon of salt (optional)
• Spoon

Instructions:

1. Pour whipping cream into screw-top plastic container. (make sure not to fill more than halfway)
2. Add the salt if you prefer salted butter.
3. Make sure you screw the top on tight.
4. Shake for 7-9 minutes or until the cream stops sloshing around and you are left with a yellow blob. You may need more than one shaker as it can get tiring.
5. Shake for a few seconds longer.
6. You have now pure butter. It’s very creamy spread on toast!

How it Works:
As you churn whipped cream, you beat droplets of butterfat until they collapse and rejoin to form a single blob of butter. This is an example of emulsion, where one liquid hangs suspended in another.

Extra Experiments:

1. If you add a squeaky-clean silver coin in with the cream, is it easier to tell when the butter is done?
2. What if you only shake for 4 minutes? What does the substance seem to turn into?
3. Could you add flavouring? Vanilla extract? Chocolate syrup? Honey? Cinnamon Sugar?
4. Learn about how temperature effects state of matter (solids, liquids and gases). Try cooling the butter, try heating the butter. Can you make it change states of matter by adding or taking away heat?

4) Polishing Pennies

• Teaches Kids About: Oxidation
• Difficulty Level: Easy
• Messiness Level: Low

Materials:

• Lemon Juice
• Dirty pennies
• A cup
• Paper Towels

Instructions:

1. Put a dirty penny in the cup and cover it with lemon juice.

2. Wait about five to ten minutes then remove the penny and wipe it off with a paper towel.

How it Works:
Pennies are made from a metal called copper. The copper mixes with oxygen, the same gas that we breathe. This causes something called oxidation and makes the penny look dirty. Lemon juice has citric acid in it that removes the dirty colour or oxidation and makes the penny nice and shiny again!

Extra Experiments:

1. Does vinegar work?
2. If you colour the penny with a marker pen does it come off?
3. Does it work with 5ps, 10ps or £1 coins?

5) Tornado in a Jar

• Teaches Kids About: Weather
• Difficulty Level: Easy
• Messiness Level: Low

This is one of the quick and easy and science experiments for kids to teach them about weather. It only takes about five minutes and a few materials to set up, but once you have it ready you and your kids can create your own miniature tornado whose vortex you can see and the strength of which you can change depending on how quickly you swirl the jar.

Materials Needed:

• A clean mason jar
• 3 cups of tap water
• 1 teaspoon of washing up liquid
• 1 teaspoon vinegar
• Glitter (optional)

Instructions:

1. Fill the mason jar with water – making sure to leave about an inch of space at the top.
2. Pour in the washing up liquid and vinegar and close the lid tightly
3. Holding one hand on top and one below, swirl the jar for about 5 seconds and then set it down on the table to watch the tornado do its thing.
4. For extra Wow factor, try adding glitter or mini Legos to the jar.

How it Works:
When you spin the water in the jar, it creates a vortex in the centre. As the water spins, centripetal force causes the water to spin around that vortex making a mini tornado.

6) Rain Cloud in a Jar

• Teaches Kids About: Weather
• Difficulty Level: Medium
• Messiness Level: Low

This experiment teaches kids about weather and lets them learn how clouds form by making their own rain cloud. This is definitely a science project that requires adult supervision since it uses boiling water as one of the ingredients, but once you pour the water into a glass jar, the experiment is fast and easy, and you’ll be rewarded with a little cloud forming in the jar due to condensation.

Materials Needed

• Glass jar with a lid
• 1 cup of boiling water
• Aerosol hairspray
• 3-5 Ice cubes
• Food colouring (optional)

Instructions:

1. Pour 1 cup of boiling water into a glass jar (we like to add blue food colour to the water so that it looks like the sky)
2. Quickly spray hairspray into the jar.
3. Immediately put the lid onto the jar. (This step must be performed quickly, so have the lid handy. It also helps to have multiple people doing the experiment. One to spray the hairspray and one to put on the lid.)
4. Place a 3-5 pieces of ice on top of the lid of the jar
5. Watch the top of the jar carefully and you will see a cloud begin to form.

6. After observing the cloud in the jar, remove the lid and watch the cloud move out of the jar.

How it Works:

• When water vapour rises into the atmosphere and then condenses onto microscopic particles (i.e. dust and dirt), a cloud will form.
• In our experiment, the boiling water in the jar caused the air inside the jar to heat up. When this happened some of the water evaporated into the air. This evaporation caused water vapour in the jar.
• Then the warm moist air (water vapour) rose from the surface of the water to the top of the jar. Once it reached the top of the jar, the ice on top of the lid caused the warm moist air to cool down.
• The water vapour in the cooling air then condensed onto the particles of hairspray and formed a cloud in the jar.
• If you observe the cloud carefully, you’ll noticed that it swirls around in the jar. This swirling is caused by the circulating air (i.e. warm air rising and cold air sinking).

7) Extinguish a candle without blowing it

• Teaches Kids About: Chemistry
• Difficulty Level: Low
• Messiness Level: Low

This experiment teaches how to extinguish a candle using carbon dioxide. This is definitely a science project that requires adult supervision since it uses a lit candle but once the candle is lit, this experiment seems almost magical to watch.
Materials Needed

• A drinking glass or a glass jar
• A piece of modelling clay
• A candle that fits inside the jar without reaching the top
• Bicarbonate of soda
• White vinegar

Instructions:

1. Stand the candle up in the jar using the modelling clay
2. Sprinkle the bicarbonate of soda around the outside of the candle.
3. Light the candle (ask a friendly adult to do this for you)
4. Dribble vinegar around the outside of the jar and watch it fizz as it reacts with the bicarbonate of soda.

5. Watch as the jar fills with carbon dioxide and ‘poof’ the flame will extinguish as if by magic

How it Works:

• When you mix bicarbonate of soda and vinegar together, you produce carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide will displace the oxygen-containing air surrounding the candle, which suffocates the flame and it goes out.
• Our lungs breathe in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide, so this experiment produces the same gas that we blow out.   

8) Rainbow rain in a jar

• Teaches Kids About: Weather
• Difficulty Level: Low
• Messiness Level: Medium

This experiment teaches how rain forms when clouds become too saturated. Make it fun by using different coloured rain.

Materials Needed:

• A glass jar
• Shaving foam
• Tap water
• Food colouring
• A pipette or glass dropper (a medicine plunger would also work!)

Instructions:

1. Fill the glass about ¾ full with water from the tap
2. Add a generous ‘cloud’ of shaving foam to the top of the glass and let it settle for a moment
3. Mix up some glasses with water and food colouring
4. Now drop the food colouring into the cloud of foam. As your cloud fills up, the food colouring water will seep through the cloud and mix with the water below, creating rainbow rain.

How it Works:
Clouds are formed when water vapour rises into the air. When the vapour hits cold air, it turns back into droplets of water.  Those tiny drops of water floating in the air collect and “stick” together to form clouds. When clouds get so saturation, they can’t hold any more water, so the water falls back to the ground as rain.

9) Colour dispersing milk

• Teaches Kids About: Chemistry
• Difficulty Level: Low
• Messiness Level: Medium

Make milk come to life with this fun colour skating experiment.

Materials Needed:

• A shallow dish or plate
• Milk (whole milk works best)
• Food colouring and a pipette / glass dropper
• Washing up liquid

Instructions:

1. Pour some milk into the dish, enough to cover the bottom of the dish.
2. Add a few drops of food dye to the milk (mix and match the colours!). try to keep them separated
3. Squeeze a little drop of washing up liquid into the centre of the dish
4. Watch the colours disperse and dance away.

How it Works:
Milk contains fats and proteins. When the washing up liquid is dropped in the milk, it weakens the chemical bonds between the fats, proteins and the rest of the milk.

The soap then attaches to the fat in the milk and this causes the cool patterns that we see. The soap molecules are moving round trying to find fat molecules to attach to. We can see this happening because of the food colouring; the soap and fat molecules bump into the food dye molecules causing them to move around. It will stop when all of the soap is mixed with the milk. 

10) Make Bouncy egg

• Teaches Kids About: Chemistry
• Difficulty Level: Low
• Messiness Level: Low
• Patience Level: High

How can you make an egg bounce? Try this eggs-periment and see.

Materials Needed

• A raw egg
• White vinegar
• A bowl

Instructions:

1. Cover an egg with vinegar in a bowl.
2. After two days drain the vinegar and cover again
3. After seven days rinse the shell off the egg with tap water. It will now be ready to bounce from a small height, enjoy! If you bounce it too high, it will pop.

How it Works:
Egg shell is made of calcium carbonate and vinegar is an acid, acetic acid to be precise. When calcium carbonate is exposed to an acid it reacts and dissolves, but the membrane inside the shell, surrounding the egg, remains intact. This what makes the egg feel rubbery.

Extra Experiments:

1. Try colouring the vinegar with food dye to make a coloured bouncy egg
2. Try the experiment with a boiled egg
3. Who can bounce a boiled egg the highest?
4. What happens if you submerge an egg in other liquids – try orange juice and coca-cola for example.

For even more fun Science experiements that kids can get involved in, visit https://www.stemtoyexpert.com/science-experiments-for-kids/