Kids' Questions

We were doing a session on static and dynamic electricity in class and we were having a hard time getting enough static to grab onto the balloon. I moved everything near a window and we talked about conditions when static worked best…. DRY conditions. I later had them try to guess the strongest force of static that they could imagine…. And we eventually talked about it being “lightening”…. One kid immediately said, “That’s not true…. You just told us that static works best in dry conditions, but I only see lightening when it rains.” We looked it up and found that the forces of static are created in the upper atmosphere where it is drier… and it is so strong that it easily overcomes the rain when it zooms towards the earth.

In the same session, another child made an observation after this discussion, when I showed them a demo on how water bends towards a static charge. “Hmm… I wonder if the rain bends towards a strike of lightening?” he said. Still don’t know the answer to that one.

When the kids were watching the colours separate using both water and alcohol…. One kid made the following observation when watching non water soluble markers separate.

“I think alcohol likes the colour more than water does”

They also wanted to try if water soluble colours could be separated with alcohol… so we tried, and we noticed a different pattern of separation with the two mediums. I’ve never had kids want to try this before and it was quite spectacular.

Another child actually asked whether they used blood to paint in the old days… when we spoke about natural colours being derived from plant material. I do believe that they did…. Need to confirm this though.

Is purple cabbage juice an acid or a base? Turns out it is acidic when tested against red/blue litmus paper. After making green eggs in class showing them how the albumin in the egg is basic and turns green in red cabbage juice, one kid went home and made “Pink Lemonade” using cabbage juice as the lemon is acidic and turns pink with the indicator.