Often times when we think of the kitchen in our home we only associate it with cooking, but your kitchen is so much more than just a space for food prepping. It is also a space to create art, conduct a scientific experiment and so much more! With our new blog series, Kid’s Kitchen Time, we are going to help you discover the variety of activities that can be done in the kitchen with your children all while creating lasting memories.
For the first blog in this series, we are turning the kitchen into a laboratory! This simple kitchen experiment can be done with common household items and lets your children see that science is everywhere. The question is: What will freeze first?
Step One
First you will want to collect all the needed materials to conduct your experiment. You will need an ice cube tray, your choice of different kitchen liquids, a device to track the time and a freezer. For the kitchen liquids you can use any common household items you would like such as dish soap, milk, vinegar and apple juice! You can also use a measuring cup in order to stay consistent with the amount of each liquid you are using.
Step Two
Begin to fill your ice cube tray with the different kitchen liquids that you chose.
After filling the tray, take this time to ask your children what they know about the liquids you chose and make a hypothesis or prediction. If they chose dish soap, do they think it will freeze? How long do they think it will take? When they make a prediction you can ask “why do you think that will happen?” This will help you will also get a hypothesis out of them.
Step Three
Now it is time to conduct the experiment and put your ice cube tray full of liquids into the freezer! At this time you can also set you timer to go off intervals so that you can check on how the liquids are freezing.
Step Four
Examine how the liquids are freezing. Is the water freezing first? What is happening to the dish soap? Be sure to record your observations!
Step Five
After you collect your results ask your children what they noticed throughout the experiment. Here are some sample questions you can ask them!
- Which liquid froze the easiest?
- Which liquid took the longest to freeze?
- Did one of the liquids not freeze?
We hope you enjoyed this simple kitchen science experiment! The best part about this activity is that it’s a great way to get the family together by doing something educational. Be sure to follow along on our blog for a new Kid’s Kitchen Time idea every Saturday!