2cd week of July - Family
Fun Project
Science Fun - Making a Home Made Lava Lamp
This is a Fun little experiment my eight year old son Patrick and I
had a great time with. He was so excited about it he wrote down the
recipe and took it to his friend's house for a sleepover and also wants
to make one for his cousins on Vacation.
This and other really cool experiments can be found at Steve
Spangler, The Science Guy's website linked to at the end of this
experiment.
Materials:
- One clean, plastic soda bottle (16 oz. size
works well) - Soda bottle cap - Vegetable oil (the cheaper the better) -
Food coloring - An Alka-Seltzer tablet - Water
Method:
- Fill the bottle 3/4 full with vegetable
oil.
- Fill the rest of the bottle with water (leave about an
inch and a half to 2 inches at the top to prevent overflows ).
-
Add about 10 drops of food coloring. Be sure to make the water fairly
dark in color. Notice that the food coloring only colors the water and
not the oil. Hmmm?
- Divide the Alka-Seltzer tablet into 8
pieces.
- Drop one of the tiny pieces of Alka-Seltzer into the
oil and water mixture. Watch what happens. When the bubbling stops, add
another chunk of Alka-Seltzer. It's just like a lava lamp!
- When
you have used up all of the Alka-Seltzer and the bubbling has completely
stopped, screw on the soda bottle cap. Tip the bottle back and forth and
watch the wave appear. The tiny droplets of liquid join together to make
one big lave-like blob.
How it works:
First of all, you confirmed what you already
knew... oil and water do not mix. The molecules of water do not like to
mix with the molecules of oil. Even if you try to really shake-up the
bottle, the oil breaks up into small little drops, but the oil doesn't
mix with the water. Food coloring only mixes with water. That's why it
does not color the oil.
When you poured the water into the soda
bottle with the oil, the water sank to the bottom. That's because water
is heavier than oil. Scientists say that the water is more dense than
the oil. If oil from a ship spills in the ocean, the oil floats on top
of the water.
Here's the surprising part... The Alka-Seltzer
tablet reacted with the water to make tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide
gas. These bubbles attached themselves to the blobs of colored water and
cause them to float to the surface. When the bubbles popped, the color
blobs sank back to the bottom of the bottle. Now that's a burst of
color!
