Saturday Night Science

This turned out to be a very quick and surprisingly fun activity for Abby and Isaiah. I found the recipe somewhere for borax snowflakes. It's the same idea as sugar rock candy, only they develop VERY quickly and are NOT edible! I think we may grow some rock candy in the  next few weeks also.

Anyway... Let the pictures speak for themselves, right?

Here is what you need: Borax, glass containers (calls for Mason jars but I used my big root-beer mugs), pencil or knives, food coloring is optional, and pipe cleaners.

* The larger pipe cleaners actually made bigger crystals. They also say to use string to attach your snowflakes to your pencil but being the rule breaker I used pipe cleaners also.

Boil one enough water to make sure your snowflakes will be covered. For making your snowflakes, take 3 pipe cleaners, cut down to size and wrap making your design. Trim off any parts that will touch the sides or bottoms. I boiled 5 cups of water and added 15 TBS of Borax. The formula is 3 TBS of borax to 1 cup of boiling water. In this picture Abby and Isaiah are adding their food coloring.

 

Counting out the drops.

Abby checking her's out.

We poured our water into our mugs, swished around, made it a bit darker... Added our snowflakes and then left them on the counter untouched until this morning.

This is what we ended up with!

 

The dark red turned out to be pink!

 

The bigger/fatter pipe cleaners made bigger crystals.

Hali wanted to try different shapes!

This was the smaller blue one. This should have stayed in the mug for another day in my opinion!

Here they are drying out! I am going to hang these in the classroom tomorrow in front of our window!