Water Temperature Experiment

Today we did an easy but exciting experiment. Well, Monkey and I both thought so! It shows you how the temperature of water can affect the speed of movement of molecules... not that I tried to explain it to Monkey that way! 

I saw the experiment here: http://www.coffeecupsandcrayons.com/simple-heat-experiment/

Supplies: three glass jars, food colouring, cold, hot, and room temperature water 

Last night, I filled one jar with water and left it on the counter to become our room temperature jar. 

Today, we started off by labeling the jars. 

Once the jars had been labeled, I put the kettle on for the hot water. Be careful with the boiling water, especially around your little one! Obviously the glass jar got very hot and I had to use oven mitts to move it after pouring the boiling water in. 

I filled the cold jar with the coldest I could get from the sink. If I did this experiment again I would put it in the fridge overnight to get it even colder. 

Once all three jars have been filled, quickly put two or three drops of food colouring in each one. In order to compare what happens you have to be fast! It would be even better if you could drop food colouring into each one at the same time. 

Here's a picture taken less then a minute after Monkey dropped the blue in. 

The food colouring spread through the hot water the fastest. 

It only took a few seconds for the water to become fully saturated with blue. 

The jar with room temperature water saturated a little slower. 

The cold water took the longest. 

At the top of the cold water jar you could still see all the individual 'strings' of blue, it looked really neat. 

Like I said previously, I didn't really get into the science of this with Monkey. But we sat and watched the colour swirling around and talked about which jar was all blue the fastest and which one took the longest. 

Monkey checked back often to see if the room temperature and cold jars were completely blue. This picture is approximately ten minutes after the start of the experiment. 

Easy set up and dramatic, works for me!

Mar