Bubble Science

Before the sudden change in weather this week, Tiger discovered a big bottle of bubble solution in the shed so he decided to spend some time outside blowing bubbles.

Meanwhile, I found the following book from the shelf and left it on the table for Tiger to read when he came in:

There are a few simple activities at the back of the book, which Tiger headed out to do after reading them, even though he already knew what the expected results would be based on observation.  For example, one of the questions asked in the book is: are bubbles always round?

Tiger knew that the answer would be a yes, since he has blown bubbles lots of times before, but he could not explain why.  The answer is clearly more complicated than I had expected -- even I could not answer it!  Nonetheless, he still had fun trying out the different wands.

Tiger also tried the other activities suggested in the book to see: (1) whether the speed of blowing would affect the size of the bubble, and (2) how big he could get his bubbles to be.   He did both, but what Tiger found to be more interesting was to see how he could alter the shape of the bubbles by blowing at them. 

We then continued to spend more time with bubbles, by making bubble prints.

 

We also experimented with Antibubbles (first time I hear of this).  This one is harder to see but we managed to make the antibubbles by trickling the sugar solution into the glass using a teaspoon.

The antibubbles are the sinking bubbles in the solution.

The most interesting experiment for Tiger was the Lemon Fizz project.  It is basically the same concept as the homemade volcano project that most of us are familiar with, but Tiger did learn that (1) the bubble he saw was carbon dioxide produced by the chemical reaction between lemon juice and baking soda, and (2) what other citrus fruits there are.  Since we added food colouring to it, we conducted the experiment at the kitchen sink to minimise the cleaning-up afterwards.

This post is linked up to several blog hops, where you can visit to see what other homeschoolers have been busy with.  We are also linked up to Carnival of Homeschooling issue 304 here.