I am delighted to bring you a guest post from Atif, who was homeschooled as a child. Enjoy! ~Kimberly
Easy Science Experiments for Homeschoolers
Science projects for homeschooling don’t need to be complicated. There are loads of straightforward, simple scientific experiments that are fun, cheap, and yet delight the senses. You will be astonished at how performing these easy science experiments will cover various science principles.
Below, you will find some science experiments that will leave your homeschooled children delighted and have them clamoring for more.
Balloon Magnet
The Experiment: Prepare a mixture of equal parts of salt and pepper and keep it on a level surface. Have your child blow up a balloon, and then rub it into their hair. Then, move the balloon near the salt-pepper mixture. The pepper will separate and adhere to the balloon. Interested to know why?
The Science: When you are rubbing hair and balloon together, you produce electricity via friction, which pulls in the pepper particles. Pepper particles are lighter compared to the heavy salt particles. Therefore, they lift up and adhere to the balloon.
Colourful Milk
The Experiment: Pour some full cream milk in a saucer and add a few drops of food colouring in various spots of the milk. Put a drop of cleaning fluid into the center of the saucer and see the results.
The Science: Milk is comprised of various particles, including protein. The food colouring finds it difficult to move around among those particles. When you introduce the cleaning fluid, it brings down the surface tension of the milk and causes the milk to react with the proteins. The blend of the two gets the atoms under way and pushes the colours around.
Felt-tip Masterpiece
The Experiment: For this experiment, draw a picture with a black felt-tip pen on a blotting paper. Plunge the tip of the blotting paper into a dish of water and permit the water to creep within the paper towards your drawing. What will happen next?
The Science: The black in the felt-tip pen is made up of various colors. As the water creeps through the blotting paper, the colours move at various paces, branching out into different shades. This is called chromatography.
The Drinking Flower
The Experiment: Introduce a few drops of food colouring into a bowl of water and put a white flower in it. Watch as the flower “drinks” the colouring into its petals. A change in the colouring will be visible in around 30 minutes.
The Science: What the flower does is absorbs the food colouring and transforms it into food for its petals. Coloured water is sucked in by the stem and transmitted to its leaves and petals. Once it’s done, the white petals display the visible colors, which give a sensation of colour change.
Hole in My Hand
The Experiment: For this experiment, have your child roll up a piece of paper, then open their left palm and place it in front of their eye. If they look through the tube with their right eye, they will find something strange. There seems to be a hole in their palm! Where did it come from?
The Science: The opening in your hand is a figment of your imagination. It is created because your mind combines the pictures each eye sees individually, to make up what you are seeing.
About the Author
Atif Qazi is a former homeschooler. You can follow him on Twitter: @Schooling_SOS
