Room 5 children enjoyed some science on Friday. We were learning about Florence Nightingale and how significant she was during the Victorian era particularly with hospital sanitation and how this revolutionised nursing.
We decided to carry out a fun experiment using soap!
We wanted to see the impact on milk that soap had and this was visible when we added food colouring. We changed a variable each time by trying different types of milk eg full milk, skim milk, soya milk and then just water. We felt that there are so many fat percentages in the different types of milk that this was a good variable to consider. Then we enjoyed observing the changes.
What happened…
We noticed the patterns and swirls in the milk when the cotton bud with fairy liquid on it was dipped in the milk.
What we found out…
Full fat milk produced the greatest patterns out of the different types of milk and the water.
Why? The scientific bit….
Milk is made up of minerals, proteins, and fats. Proteins and fats are susceptible to change. When soap is added to the milk, the soap molecules run around and try to attach to the fat molecules in the milk.
However, you wouldn’t see this change happen without the food colouring! The food colouring looks like fireworks because it’s getting moved around and creates a colour explosion.
The soap lowers the surface tension of the milk. When the soap molecules head for the fats they cause movement and create cool bursts and swirls of colour. After all the fat molecules have been found there is no more movement.
This was really cool to watch and we understood why the full fat milk (with more fat molecules) produced greater patterns!
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