We all scream!

The word on the street is that I've been negligent in keeping you all up to date in the super exciting things. Well, truth be told. We don't have anything exciting going on here. Unless you count the super yummy treat I made with my students in my physical science class last Monday. We are studying the colligative properties of water. For the non chemists those are the properties that change when you add a solute to a solvent. Here we added salt, the solute to ice, the solvent. And the effect is that the ice melted, but stayed cold. See the salt gets in the way of the nice and neat organization of the ice crystal. When it can't be nice and neatly organized, it becomes a liquid. Like Ialways say, "Dang salt always getting in the way of the water molecules being able to form those hydrogen bonds!"

We could put salt on ice and just take the temperature at regular intervals, but that would be boring. So instead we mix up 125 mL of whole milk (lots of yummy fat), 125mL of whipping cream (NOT half and half), 50g of sugar and 0.75 mL of 4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde and put it in a quart bag. Then we put the ice and salt in a gallon bag and put the quart bag (well sealed!) inside of the gallon bag. Mix for about 15 minutes. Measure the temp of the now salt water and then consume the contents of the quart bag! We had some extra, so we tried it again on Friday for an after school snack.

I think I'm the only one who doesn't like it - It just doesn't get hard enough to eat with a fork!

Hey for all you international moms, I even did the measurements in the metric system. And your measuring cup probably does too! My kids LOVED it. For the local mom who needs a science experiment... try different quantities of salt and see how cold it gets. This is really a cure all! I've heard that you can wrap it in newspaper and duct tape and kick it around the yard! Really! We're going to try it sometime.