The Science of Dissolving

Sarah's Science Fair poster

Can I just say that whoever decided to have a 6th grade Science Fair a week after returning from Christmas break either doesn't have kids or hates Christmas.Whatever the case, our elementary school held Sarah's Science Fair on January 9th. Of course, we didn't work on it at all over the Christmas break and not much between the time school started up again and a few days before it was due. This left us with A LOT of work that first week in January.

Sarah decided to do her project on "How Things Dissolve."  Luckily Kenny is much smarter than me, and he doesn't have the clouded mommy brain that I seem to not be able to kick, and he was able to help Sarah think through her project, help her design how it would look, and explain to her all that was going on. There's no way it would have worked without him.

Sarah at the Science Fair with her best friend
Addy (who broke her wrist sledding a few days earlier.)

Her finally project was pretty cool. She tried to mix 5 things in water to see which of  them dissolved or mixed. She learned about density and saturation point. Thanks to modern technologies (aka digital cameras and printed pictures from Sam's Club) we were able to take a number of pictures to show the different parts of her experiment.

All in all a lot of things were learned.
1. Don't procrastinate. We were up with Sarah until almost 11:00 the last night trying to finish her poster. I had told her numerous times in the weeks before it was due to start on her report, but she never did. She learned a valuable lesson and I learned not to let her get away with not working.
2. Sarah learned a lot more about dissolving and how it all works. Kenny explained some things that were even foreign to me so she definitely learned more than she was planning on.
3. A hard lesson she learned was if you want to do well in life you have to put in the time. Sarah was so disappointed that she didn't win anything during the Science Fair. We had to explain to her that those who won worked on their projects over the entire month they were given. They put in the time and created a good project. She learned that waiting until last minute may get the job done, but not done as well as it could be done.

At the Science Fair