Susan's Homeschool Blog

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What happens when you have weird-shaped objects, and you want to know their volume? Find out a clever way to do just that! We will be measuring the volume of a solid in our experiment today. My younger two children are using Christian Kids Explore Chemistry by Bright Ideas Press, and this is one of the fun experiments in the book.

Grab three interesting-shaped rocks from your backyard, and label them A, B, and C with a permanent marker. Grab a glass measuring cup and pour 300 ml of water into it. Now you will want to place one rock into the water. Measure how much the water went up. How high is the water now? Write it down. Then subtract the number from the original number (300 ml). You will find out the volume of the rock! Whatever amount of water the rock displaced is the amount of space it filled up, or its volume.

Remove Rock A from the water and measure Rock B in the same way. Was the rock smaller, larger, or the same volume? What about Rock C? Our third rock had the largest volume of the three rocks.

Measuring the Volume of a Solid Experiment

Now you can see how we performed this fun experiment:

Make sure to write down each of your measurements on the chart provided in the book. It helps if you clip the page to a clip board so that you can write your measurements as you are doing the experiment. If you want, you can doodle all over the rest of your page, as if you were a mad scientist!

This post contains affiliate links. I was compensated for my work in writing this post.

Today we are talking about acids and bases, and we will be doing an experiment to show what happens when you combine an acid and a base. We are using Christian Kids Explore Chemistry by Bright Ideas Press to study elementary-level chemistry this year with my younger two kids.

First we went through the house opening cupboards, trying to find acids and bases. The book gives some examples of chemical names for acids and bases, and you can see if you can find those chemicals by looking at the list of ingredients for household cleaning products and food.

Here are some of the items we came up with:

Acids

• Vitamin C–ascorbic acid
• Tomato Sauce–citric acid
• Face Cleaning Product–salicylic acid
• Bubble Bath–citric acid
• Soft drinks–phosphoric acid

Bases

• Ammonia–ammonium hydroxide
• Oven Cleaner–sodium hydroxide
• Baking Soda–sodium bicarbonate

Acids and Bases Experiment

Now we are going to conduct a simple experiment that shows what will happen when you combine an acid and a base:

If you want to see this fun explosion in blue and red, check out these posts:

• Vinegar and Baking Soda Experiment  (blue explosion)
• Make Your Own Volcano  (red explosion)

Don’t combine just any acid with any base, or you could create toxic fumes that could kill you.

So what is the difference between an acid and a base? Acids are chemical compounds that donate or give away a proton (hydrogen ion) during a chemical reaction. Bases receive a proton (hydrogen ion) during a chemical reaction. So when you see this reaction with the vinegar and baking soda fizzing, the acid (the vinegar) is giving away a proton, and the base (the baking soda) is receiving the proton. Isn’t that cool?