Naked Egg Experiment!

Another fun experiment that we did this week while studying about the skeletal system was the Naked Egg Experiment. SO FUN! We let an egg (regular, not hard boiled!) soak in vinegar for one day. Zoey removed the egg from the vinegar and rinsed it under water and the shell just rinsed away...

leaving a gelatinous, rubbery egg with no shell!

Super cool experiment! We are going to now put it in a cup of water and it's supposed to expand, showing osmosis...this experiment was showing how the acid from the vinegar removed the calcium carbonate from the hard egg shell. It was to show what acid can do to the enamel on teeth.

2 CH3COOH + CaCO3 = Ca(CH3COOH)2 + H2O + CO2
Acetic acid + Calcium carbonate = Calcium acetate + Water + Carbon dioxide

Bend-y Bones!

So this week in science we've been covering the skeletal system...everything bones! It's been a fun unit with lots of manipulatives and experiments. One of Zoey's experiments was to soak a bone in vinegar (an acid) and to see what happened.

The vinegar ended up pulling out the calcium from the bone and thus made the bones rubbery and bendable! Definitely not as strong. We let our chicken bones soak for two days...the small bones were completely bendable and the larger leg bone was soft and bendable on the ends. We think that had we kept it soaking for one more day it too would have been completely bendable like the smaller bones.

This was a super fun experiment and showed just how important calcium is to bones!

Science: Extracting DNA

For science we're still talking about DNA so for some fun we attempted to extract DNA from Zoey and from a strawberry.

This is Zoey's DNA organizing itself to the top...

And there it is all balled up on the stir stick...

We thought it would be fun to get a close-up look of it and put it on a slide. It was cool, but I think if we had a more powerful microscope on our hands it would have been even cooler. Ours is a pretty simple battery operated one but it still magnified it some.

This is our attempt at extracting DNA from a strawberry which ended up not being quite as successful for some reason.

You can see tiny globs of it stuck to the side of the jar below...

An easy and fun science project that definitely made learning about DNA meaningful!