Time for a Science Experiment!!

The rain let up for a little bit today, so the boys were finally able to get about 10 minutes of outside play.   I have never been so happy to see the sun, even if it did mean that there would be muddy footprints through out the house.

Today we rocked day 5 in the workbooks.  The kids have finally adjusted to the new schedule, so they tend to get right into it.  Next was the journals.  They each wrote a story about their masks that they had made yesterday.  A's was pretty straightforward and filled with facts from yesterday's assignment, K's was more imaginative (somehow iron man was involved).  

I decided to end the day's lesson with a simple experiment regarding chromatography.  It was designed to see how ink dissolved into water.  We took a standard coffee filter (I only had the basket type), crayola markers (not permeant), and three glasses of water.  Used those plastic cups that the boys always get when we go out to eat because I could throw them away when we finished the experiment.  We cut the coffee filter into three strips.  Each strip got a different color dot about 1/3 of the way up the filter strip.  We used Blue, Red, and Yellow as our test colors.  Next we dipped the filters into the water leaving some dry area between the dots and the water line.  Finally we watched and recorded how each of the colors reacted when the water finally reached them.  The whole thing turned out pretty neat and the boys seemed to enjoy it as well!

Coffee filter chromatography