Dear Teachers Q & A

            Parents: Your children may not have had the opportunity to do many hands-on science experiments this past year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our summer science activities will give them a chance to not only learn more about basic science concepts, but also have fun doing it.

          Be sure to choose activities for them that are age-appropriate. Some will require parental supervision to ensure their safety. You can find more science activities on our Dear Teacher website under “Learning Activities - Science.” Plus, there are endless science activities online. Just search for “science experiments for kids.” You can add the words easy, fun and video to reveal even more choices.

A Science Experiment with Sound

          Children love to make noise, and this experiment is all about an audio ruckus. Sound is part of physical science, so here is an opportunity to learn more about it by making a water xylophone. To do this, kids need water, four or more mason jars (or the same size tall glasses), wooden sticks (tinker toys, bamboo skewers) and food coloring. Here are the steps they should follow:

1. Tap the empty jars or glasses with the wooden sticks to get an idea of the starting sound.
2. Fill the jars or glasses with varying levels of water.
3. Add food coloring to each one.
4. Tap the different jars or glasses to observe the sound or pitch each produces.
5. Note how the tapping sounds when tapping the top of containers rather than the sides. Is it a purer sound?

Expanding the Experiment

1. Tap with a table fork instead of a wooden stick and observe whether it produces a different sound.
2. Fill two glasses to the same level with different liquids. See how the sounds differ. Because the liquids have different densities, the sound waves will travel differently through them.

The Science of Taste

          Pizza tastes great—and so does chocolate ice cream. This is mostly thanks to the 10,000 taste buds on your tongue that send a message to your brain. Wait a minute! You can’t give all the credit for how foods taste to your tongue, though. The nose also plays a role. Food releases chemicals that travel up your nose. This activity will let you investigate how great a role your nose plays in determining what you taste. Parents should supervise this test to make sure the foods are handled in a safe way.

1. Choose eight different foods—two each of sweet, salty, sour and bitter flavors.
2. Mash up the foods so their texture is not recognizable.
3. Divide the food into bowls so that everyone doing the tasting will have two samples of each food.
4. For your taste test, all foods should be at room temperature.
5. To begin the experiment, have everyone doing the test put on a blindfold and a nose plug like the ones used in swimming.
6. Be sure to explain to your test volunteers that everything they taste will be a familiar food and that they will taste all the foods first with the nose plug on and then with it off.
7. Have one volunteer at a time taste the food. The other volunteers should be in another room.
8. Have the volunteer take a sip of water before each food tasting.
9. For each food, ask the volunteer to identify the food, then record the result as correct or incorrect.
10. After the volunteer has tasted all the foods wearing a nose plug, repeat the experiment without the nose plug.
11. When all the volunteers have completed the taste test, your results will show you the role the nose plays in identifying the taste of foods.
12. Do let the volunteers see the foods after each one’s taste test is complete, so everyone can see what role the nose plays in food identification.

Cleaning Coins Is Science

          When you want to get your clothes clean, you put them in the washing machine with soap. You do the same thing to yourself when you are dirty and hop in the bathtub or shower with a bar of soap. But did you know that you can clean the penny in your pocket—but not with soap?

          To remove the dirt on a penny, you need dirty pennies and a glass jar, vinegar and salt.  Fill half of the jar with vinegar and put in one teaspoon of salt. When the salt dissolves, add a few dirty pennies. Wait a few minutes, then take out some of the pennies and lay them on a paper towel to dry. Then take out the remaining pennies, but rinse them well in water before putting them out to dry. Next, study the two different sets of dry pennies. You will see some of the pennies are bright and shiny, while the others have turned a bluish-green color.

          What happened? The vinegar solution remained on the pennies that were not rinsed in water. When the oxygen in the air hit them, they lost their shiny new look and turned bluish-green. However, when the other pennies were rinsed, the cleaning stopped, so they remained shiny.

          You can continue this experiment by trying it on other coins. Do you think the same thing will happen? To learn about how coins are made, visit USMmint.gov.

Parents should send questions and comments to dearteacher@dearteacher.com or to the Dear Teacher website.

©Compass Syndicate Corporation, 2020