The educator in me roars to the forefront when my
grandchildren visit and I do my lesson plans to have activities for them,
hoping we can spend some memorable time together. Thanks to a very bright
lady's web site, I found an activity involving pennies.
We collect spare change in a plastic container in my kitchen,
so I separated the pennies into two groups--the shiny pennies, and the dark
pennies. I put them into different dishes and my granddaughter who is nine has
a great curiosity about stuff so I asked her how they were different. She
quickly saw that some were shiny, and some were dark. Then I asked her why they
were different but she didn't know. So I asked her if we could make them the
same. She thought that the dark pennies could be made shiny also.
I asked her how to make the dark pennies shiny and she said
we should wash them in soap and water which we did, but it didn't change the
pennies. I asked her if there might be other ways to change the pennies. Since
her mom cleans things with vinegar, she suggested vinegar. We tried vinegar and
nothing happened. She suggested that we separate them into two different dishes
and try different things on them and keep in mind what worked and what didn't.
According to my "lesson plan," salt should be added to the vinegar and
I asked her if that might work. She thought that would be a great idea so we
added salt to one container and let it soak several minutes. We had not
measured quantities in either dish. We let them soak and some pennies became
brighter, and some did not.
When I asked her why, the whole family got involved. My
hubby was a metallurgist in grad school, and told her about the metallic
content of pennies. My son was a chemist in grad school and looked online which
showed us how that the metallic content changed with different dates of production so she
started looking at the dates of all the pennies. He told her about the oxidation
process and why the Statue of Liberty is green. Her mom was a business major,
so she told her how much it costs to produce a penny and how it isn't worth
what it costs to make it. Her younger brother played with the shiny pennies and
counted them to be part of the event.
They had to go home before we finished the whole project,
and she asked me to leave the pennies separated into groups so we can analyze
the experiment and draw some conclusions. We will also go into some web sites that suggest other methods like Tabasco sauce, lemon, or coke for making pennies shiny and the chemistry gets really interesting when combined with a nail.
I had already printed some sheets
listing the Scientific Method for elementary school children so when she
returns, we will go through the process and she can see what we did and how to
present the results. I did not want to introduce the paper in the beginning, I
just wanted to get her involved in the process and analyze it later. She was
very good at suggesting variables and we will recap those details later. She
will be learning a new vocabulary based on a simple activity. She had a really
exciting experience, and I loved how the whole family got involved. I enjoy
working on these projects with her because she is so excited to explore new
experiences. I like to make learning fun for her and kitchen chemistry is cool.
