Growing Crystals

Time for another Science Project. This one we got from the book Super Science Concoctions. It’s an OK book but there were only a few things at this stage that I think will hold Kiddo’s interest. I decided to give a project about growing crystals a try. You can find directions for this on the web quite easily but essentially the steps are:

1. Fill a jar with hot water (preferably boiling)

2. Saturate the water with any number of substances. We used borax and epsom salts but other suggestions include sugar and table salt. For borax you need about 3 TBSP per cup and epsom salt about twice as much as the amount of water. Basically you just pour it in until it no longer dissolves. You can see in the photo that we got carried away and there is about a 1/2 inch layer of the salt in the bottom of the jar!

3. Place a pipe cleaner (if you are deft with your fingers you can fashion it into a star or other shape — ours are a bit amorphous) attached to a string into the solution.

4. The directions in the book say to wait overnight, but it really takes at least 24 hours for the crystals to become substantial.

Kiddo kept wanting to check the pipe cleaners before they were ready which was a good lesson in patience and I tried to explain that scientists have to observe things over long periods of time. When it was done Kiddo got to have another lesson in scientific comparison since the crystals formed by borax were quite different than those from the epsom salts. Sorry I don’t have photos, but now you can be surprised!

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