STEAM Challenge Friday – Exploding Snowman

Exploding Snowman

Today’s STEAM Challenge is all about Science and a little art. Specifically, chemistry! This project requires minimal household ingredients. Simply put your bag and ingredients together and watch before your eyes a fun-filled chemistry experiment.

Materials:
-Sandwich size Ziplock bag (or larger if you want to double it for double the fun!) – the slide ones are quick and easy or little fingers
-vinegar
-blue food coloring (optional)
-baking soda
-paper towel
-black and orange sharpie

Instructions:

  1. Add snowman designs to your sandwich Ziplock bag. You can use marker/sharpie, stickers, or even construction paper.
  2. Put 3 teaspoons of baking soda in a paper towel. Wrap this up into a pouch.
  3. Optional: Add your food coloring to your folded paper towel pouch.
  4. Now quickly pour in 1-2 cups of distilled white vinegar into your melting snowman Ziplock bag.
  5. Quickly seal the bag and get ready for the chemical reaction to start with the vinegar and baking soda.

Before you add the vinegar to your bag, ask some questions to your little scientist. Like, what do we know about baking soda and vinegar. Make some observations. Then, based on our current knowledge and observations, ask what they think will happen? Make some predictions!

Now do your experiment!! What happened? Were your predictions correct? How did the ingredients change? What happened to the Ziplock bag?

What a fun chemical reaction!!

Here is what happened >>

The vinegar and baking soda creates a vigorous acid-base reaction. The bubbles you see are the rapid release of CO2 as unstable carbonic acid (formed first) breaks down, offering a fun way to learn about chemistry.

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xo Shiny Happy Kids