It has been two long weeks cooped up indoors. And not because of the weather. In fact, if anything, it seems that it has been unseasonably warm. But no, rather it is because the plague of the flu has been running rampant through our household.
First, we had one of the scariest nights with our Little Mister. He had a fever for two days, at one point even reaching as high as 107 degrees! But it seemingly disappeared as quickly as it came on with no other symptoms.
A few short days later, I came down with the flu, but mine was slightly worse, coming on as a fever, chills, and a terrible cough that insists on sticking around.
And then a couple days after I had it, when I was finally starting to feel better, my Little Miss came down with all of it – the fever, the chills, the congestion, and the cough. She didn’t escape any of it and right when we thought she was starting to do better and the fever had been gone for a few days, it returned.
Sick little ones are so sad. They are miserable, they can’t always tell you what’s wrong and, for babies my daughter’s age, there are far fewer medications they can take to relieve all of it.
I am lucky enough to have my husband who played nurse maid to all of us and kept his sanity. I don’t know how he seemed to do it. Not only that, but I had a wonderful mother who was making runs to the store for us for things like soup, crackers, and cough drops. But if you’d be wondering where I was and why there hadn’t been a new post – we were just trying to get healthy.
Now it’s been almost two weeks and we are finally almost ready to re-enter the real world. Just in time because things are about to get busy again with more holidays, more exploring, and more fun.
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I wanted to do a little Valentine’s Day activity with the kids. I was hoping to incorporate it as one of my school lessons, so making it science related seemed to be the easiest.
A few months ago, my son was invited to a birthday party at the Perot Museum in Dallas. We love this museum and go often – we have a membership that makes this possible. At the birthday party, they did the old volcano experiment with vinegar and baking soda.
If you’ve never made a volcano in school and mixed baking soda and vinegar, here is a bit of a spoiler alert – the two combine to make a type of explosion.
For a bit of the science behind this…
Baking soda and vinegar will have a chemical reaction because one is a base (baking soda) while the other is an acid (vinegar). In the small amounts that you will see in the following activity, the bubbles created on the hearts is the decomposing of the carbonic acid (which is created by the two types of ions in the baking soda and vinegar combining). This is similar to the carbonation in sodas. In this activity, you won’t be using amounts large enough to create the explosions you see when you make the volcanos, but the result is no less cool.
Materials Needed:
- White Paper (a thicker paper will help withstand the vinegar best)
- Baking Sheet
- Aluminum Foil
- Bowl(s)
- Spoon(s)
- Pipettes
- Food Coloring
- Muffin Tin/Egg Carton/Bowls
- Paper Towel
- White Vinegar
- Baking Soda
Activity Procedure:
1. Line baking sheet with aluminum foil. This will help protect your baking sheet and make clean up really easy. Honestly, I line my baking sheets with aluminum foil almost all the time nowadays. Most aluminum foil will already be the width of your baking sheet, just make it a little longer to tuck underneath the ends.
2. Fill bowl(s) with baking soda.
3. Cut hearts from paper. I did the old-school method where I folded the paper in half and cut the heart that way so the two sides were even, but you do you and cut the hearts however you desire.
4. Lay one or two hearts on the baking sheet and let your kiddo sprinkle baking soda all over the heart. Make sure it is well covered.
5. While they are spreading baking soda, fill a couple of the muffin tin places with about a ¼ cup of vinegar. Then use the food coloring to make them whichever colors your child prefers. We did yellow, blue, red, green, orange, and purple. Full disclosure- the purple did not come out as nicely because I just have the basic 4 colors and tried to mix them. If you have an actual purple already made, it might work better.
If you have kids like mine, it is important to not put the vinegar in front of your kids until they are absolutely ready with their hearts and you’ve taken away the baking soda from in front of them. If you don’t you may end up with one of them pouring the entire small bowl of baking soda into one of the muffin tin spots because they realize the cool reaction it will make. It’s cool, but there also went your baking soda.
6. Using the pipette, drizzle the vinegar onto the hearts to get the fizzing reaction. I had to show my kids how to use the pipette the first time. Little Mister got it pretty quickly but I did have to help Little Miss some. I use the technique, “Squeeze. Let go. Hold.” to convey squeezing the top, letting go to allow the pipette to fill with liquid, and then holding it like that until it’s over the baking soda.
7. Once the entire heart is covered with the colored vinegar and no more reactions are happening, I lifted the heart and allowed the excess liquid to drip off onto the baking sheet, then laid it on paper towel to dry.
This really was a relatively easy activity to do, the kids had a blast, and the clean up was easy. Now we have several hearts to decorate the house with!
As far as the kids’ review? Let’s just say the kids had so much fun with this activity, they woke up from their naps asking to do it again. Have fun and enjoy the snap, crackle, and fizz of these colorful hearts!