Water theme Science Day

Had a lovely long sleep, 10 hours I think, woken by postman, but at least he wasn't early.

Got my washing on first thing, had huge bowl of cereal and then a lovely relaxing bath.

After that it was time for some water-themed science.

J and F popped out to get a sample of the stream water and we also got samples of rain water, drinking water from the cold tap and water from the hot tap.

The kit we were using was just a cheap aquarium water testing kit, so tested for ammonia on one strip and pH, carbonate hardness and water hardness, nitrates and nitrites on the other.

We discovered that stream water and tap waters were very similar, whereas rain water was more acidic, had more ammonia in and was less 'hard' with less calcium carbonate in and less nitrate content. Talked about various reasons for that and where the stream water comes from. In picture below, the order is stream, rain, hot, cold.

We decided we would do samples of our wee to test later too and compare, which we did. All our wees had a high level of ammonia compared with all the water samples. J's wee was fairly neutral pH and most similar to the stream and tap water! F and I had slightly acidic wee and all our wee was higher in carbonate and nitrates than the water samples, but J and I had higher nitrate levels than F.

F also did a floating experiment, with various items - felt pen, coin, grape, satsuma, apple, dice. She had a column for her guesses whether they would float or not and a column for what actually happened, made her guesses for each item and filled them in. Then tried floating each thing and filled in the other column. Think she had seen it in a book, but was very good, as she did it all properly scientifically without help. I showed her how a satsuma will float with its peel still on but sink when peeled.

Then we were going to make interference wave patterns with a compass, and she started and did a bit, but it was getting late, so I ran her a bath and got on with dinner and hanging some washing up.