Homeschool day at the museum

Can we say overachiever? Maybe. We went to the home school chemistry day at the Fort Worth children's museum today, and most of the activities were meant for children starting in grade 3. Darn. Luckily they did have a few things we could do.

They had some fun experiments including exploding somethings.....I didn't get too close to those, but David and Quincy staid there for longer than any other child and would have staid there watching the caps blow off the little bottle things (nice, I don't know any of the correct terms) for hours. I'm pretty sure they were filling the little viles with dry ice or some other equivalent then capping them off to seal in the gasses. They also had this really neat paper-coloring thing. They took shaving cream, added food coloring, put the shaving cream on the paper in various colors, then scraped it off. It ended up making this neat swirly kind of pattern on the paper. It was really cool, especially because you could just scrape the shaving cream off one paper and then just use it on the next one too. There was a dry ice demonstration which was pretty neat. The presenter had some dry ice in a clear box, then blew some bubbles for the kids. They observed what happened to them first outside the box them she blew some in the box and then they observed what happened there. They floated on top of the carbon dioxide, so they were able to see the effects of the gas even if they couldn't see the gas. Then she made a cloud and explained how a cloud is a liquid because you can't see a gas. I'm still not convinced it is a liquid, because it was only a cloud because of the gas to which the liquid was adhering. I would still say a cloud is neither a gas or a liquid, but some symbiotic relationship between the two. I guess I should study up on that a little more. There was also a little demonstration/explanation on smell. And apparently the reason things smell different is because of the way molecules are shaped. Very interesting.

Here are some--not very good--pictures (I gotta get me a camera).

 

As the kids were doing some of the experiments I thought I would practice being friendly (because sometimes I really do need practice with that). So I asked one of the presenters if she were a student at the university helping with the event. Um....she was a professor. D'oh! She really looked like she could have been twenty. Oh well. But I did learn some fascinating things. She studies....I mean, teaches about (and researches, so that's studying, right?) inorganic matter. Namely, metals. But her focus is metals and how they affect our bodies (once again, I can't think of the correct terminology. I want to say physiology, but I don't think that's the word she used). Metals are essential to life, but there are certain pathways in our bodies that they are supposed to follow. Occasionally (and no one knows why yet) that pathway will break down (from aging, but that's not very specific) and the metals will go to the wrong place. She said they are dong research on those pathway breakdowns and Alzheimer's (which I must have because I had the word until I was supposed to write it and then my brain blanked for a full minute trying to recall it). She also mentioned other terminal diseases but focused mainly on Alzheimer's. It was something I had never even thought of. I knew we needed metals, and I knew too much lead can be corrosive, but even metals in healthy amounts could contribute to some diseases from our bodies slow decay over time (aging) because they go to the wrong places. Fascinating. Or maybe I'm just a nerd.