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| Our theme this week - WATER! Good ol' H2O! AW YEAH! |
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| Some of our Young Professors! Studying the capillary action of water! Although in this picture, Cohen looks more like a Young Superhero! |
So last week I was so inspired and had enjoyed Science Week so much that I thought ... lets make Science Week a biweekly event. Soooooo..... Science DosWeek? Two Weeks of Science? Biweek sounds weird, like a tiny little bicycle thats too weak to carry anything ... So I just went with Water Week, when in doubt go with some alliteration! It'll lift your spirits ten-fold!
So Water Week commenced on a spritely and well organized pace! We had the joy of the Young Professors on Wednesday morning, who graced us with their presence and sound mind! The yells of H2O!!!! echoed throughout our library and I was thankful that we have our children's program before we open the library to the public! Although I'm sure Marie, our library director, and Nicole were not amused by our ruckus!
Nevertheless, 'twas a fine morning to bask in the miraculousness of water! Last week, during our Guest Wednesday, Allyson shared the Strange ... But True facts about water! She talked about ice floating in water and how used to it we must be, when in fact its CRAZY! Solids usually sink in their liquid form, right? It makes sense! Solid = dense and compactly sorted molecules that move slightly or vibrarte in place and Liquid = flowing spaced out molecules that fill their container. So you would think a solid would sink, but with ice in water, it floats! And thank goodness for that! Allyson explained to us the characteristics of water that lead to H-bonding and the crystalline-like spacing of water as it freezes into ice and how that also lends to the lovely shapes of snowflakes!
She also explained how vital floating ice is to our aquatic ecosystems and the world. With floating ice, lakes generally freeze on the surface, leaving fish underneath, still able to swim around! If water sunk when frozen than the tops of lake would freeze in the winter and sink to the bottom of the lake, wrecking havoc on marine life! Also if this occurred in our oceans, icebergs and frozen masses would sink and inevitability mean that the water levels would rise dramatically leaving little to no exposed land on the earth! Whew, TLDR --> floating ice is a strange, but good thing.
Thank you H-bonds!
So, we started our Wednesday morning talking about water's ability to DEFY GRAVITY!!! - insert Wicked music here - well its not as dramatic as I like make it out to be, but it is quite necessary for plant-life and therefore all life!
With the kids, we talked about watering plants and how their roots absorb the water in the soil, be it from rain or from us watering them! But how is it that water from the soil makes it to the tip-top tops of plants? especially if we think about the tall redwood trees or high reaching trees! The answer? capillary action!
To demonstrate water's gravity defying abilities I place one cup full of blue water atop a pedestal, or in this case a box of food colouring and then beside it on the table I placed an empty cup. To connect the two empty and water filled cups I took a piece of paper towel and placed it into one cup and into the other (see picture below). Almost immediately as I stuck the paper towel into the cup full of water the water slowly began its ascent up the paper towel! --> capillary action!
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| The capillary action of water in action! |
Now, one special characteristic of water is its cohesiveness among its molecules, this is due to water molecules inherent polarity that is due to the electrostatic differences across the negatively charged oxygen atom and positively charged hydrogen atoms, because of this charge separation, water molecules have a positive side and a negative side, resulting in a polar molecule. And as we generally learn in our physics classes when we talk about charges, or if we are scrounging around on plentyoffish looking for our one true love, we know that OPPOSITES ATTRACT! So water molecules have a large affinity to fit together with their positive sides to negative sides of another water molecule, resulting in a high cohesion force (the ability of like substances to cling to each other) among water molecules to stay together.
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| A fine example of how water beads up due to COHESION! on non-polar material, like leaves. |
You can really observe this cohesion of water molecules, when you place some water on wax paper and how immediately the water beads up into sort of spherical droplets rather than spreading out. These sphere-like droplets form from the attraction among the water molecules and results naturally in sphere shapes, since they have the smallest possible surface area to volume ratio.
Now in the terms of our paper towel in the water experiment what we see between our two cups, its this cohesion between the water molecules that allow for a string of water to slowly climb the paper towel. Its this action that also occurs in plants that allows for water to travel up a tree trunk or flower stem!
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| String of water molecules travelling up a plant! H-bonds! |
So the water in our paper towel moved along the tiny gaps in the fibre of the paper towel, this is due to the adhesive force (the clinging between two dissimilar substances - in this case the paper towel and water) that allows for the water to slowly climb the paper towel, and eventually start to fill the empty cup where the paper towel ends!
Although I didn't go into huge detail about the hydrogen bonding and cohesion/adhesion forces at work, the Young Professors were enthralled in coming back to watch the water climbing in between our activities for the day! Although I must say, the paper towel we used today worked wonders and the water moved quite quickly!
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| Here are some of the boys checking out the capillary action of water! Huzzah! |
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| Chesney, Elijah, Cody and Cohen (and some parts of Tyler and an eye of Zoe!) looking a bit bewildered by water! |
After this we had a quick story time with one of my favourite people, Mr. Hank Green, I took an excerpt from this great Crash Course video about water! In the video, Hank tells the story of an eccentric scientist named Henry Cavendish, who was a scientific genius/madman, who pre-discovered many scientific laws and made groundbreaking discoveries about the composition of water, in a time when people thought water was an element in itself!
Watch the video here in its entirety! The part we watched was from 5:50 - 7:56, although we did indulge ourselves to watch a few more bits and pieces!
