Welcome back for another STEM Saturday! Today is a special edition for a few reasons. First of all, we are back to posting! Boy did we miss chatting with you and telling you about our day. In addition, today we are sharing some really fun soap experiments we did to go along with our Clean Mud post today. Be sure to hop on over to check out all the amazing recipes.
* This post may contain affiliate links for your convenience. Click here for my full disclosure.
Setting Up Soap Science Experiments for Kids
Materials
Various types of Soap (including Ivory)
Cups/ Containers
Water
Optional:
Magnifying Glass
Timer
Rulers
Chart paper
My boys were really excited to try Clean Mud but wanted to know why it works and why we would want to put soap in our recipe. We decided to to slow down and take the time to find out more about the soaps and see the similarities and differences.
To begin, made a chart to record our observations on and we filled 4 cups with water and labeled the cups with the tiles of each oils.
Making Observations of Soap with Kids
We talked about how each soap smelled. How it felt. What did the soap look like? How were they the same? How were they different? What initial observations did they have about the soap they were presented.
Before I opened each soap, I had them predict what they thought the soaps features would be. I explained how they were using their schema (what they already know) to make informed decisions. It was really cool to hear my oldest tell me about all his experiences with soap that I had no clue he even remembered.
We took notes of all of our findings and now we were ready for our explorations.
Does Soap Sink of Float?
What do you think? Why do you think that? Make your predictions before you keep reading!
Are you ready to see what happened? The boys were floored! You might be too!
Ivory soap floats!!! WOW! Why? This is a great discussion to have with the kids. You can talk about density, what causes items to be dense and what effects that has on the items properties.
The boys noticed some other changes almost immediately…
The water started to change. While it wasn’t what we thought we were going to do, the boys marked the time and decided to keep track of how long it took to dissolve. They predicted that it would take 3 days to dissolve. We will see if they are correct.
Next it was time to see what happened when they microwaved the soap….
Do you have a favorite STEM activity? I would love to know! Connect with me onFacebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram or subscribe by email. I can’t wait to hear your ideas
TIME FOR STEM SATURDAY BLOG HOP!
Every Saturday we will get so many wonderful ideas linked up from around the web that we have decided we want to feature some of these great ideas. That’s why every Saturday, I will pick from the posts linked up and feature my absolute favorites. This might be a hard choice to make, luckily you can always head over to last week’s post and check out more great science resources!
VISIT THESE GREAT BLOGGERS FOR MORE STEM FUN!
13 Simple and Fast Science Experiments for Kids from The Science Kiddo
Junk Drawer Sink or Float from FSPDT
Follow Little Bins For Little Hands’s board STEM Saturday on Pinterest.
I make soap as a hobby. You can make soap that floats by whipping the soap batter. This whips air into it making it float. I’m not sure if that’s how Ivory does it though.
I love this. Good science all around from observations to using prior knowledge and creating hypotheses. Thanks for the post!
Pingback: Making Soap Lab Experiment | Best Soap Making Recipes
Pingback: Fail Proof Guide to Introducing Messy Activities for Kids