This year Gavin was super excited to participate in his school's science fair. We looked at many possible ideas for his project and came upon one that excited him more than any other, making his own crystal garden. We took some time to collect our materials. The one ingredient we needed that sent me on a treasure hunt all over town was Bluing. It used to be a common product people used to do laundry, namely keep white clothes whiter. But after visiting four stores I couldn't locate it anywhere. Finally Amazon came to the rescue! Once we had all our materials we began our five day process of growing crystals.
Day 1 was to cut up sponges, sprinkle with a cup of salt, add bluing and water.
Day 2 We started to see some crystals forming! We added more water, salt, ammonia, and bluing and then let it sit again.
Day 3 We just had to observe.
Day 4 We added some more salt, ammonia and water and then some food coloring.
Day 5 By day five the crystals were taking over the pan. They were even growing on the edge and falling out of the pan!
Yay! The experiment worked! Gavin was so excited to see his crystals flourishing. These crystals weren't like the crystals you may think of that are solid. They were very delicate to the touch. If we touched them they would crumble like snow falling from the sky. Any sort of movement could ruin the garden, so we had to be very gentle with the crystals so we didn't disrupt it's beautiful landscape.
Now that we knew the experiment worked we waited until 5 days before the Science Fair to do his final crystal garden and make it more colorful.
And this was his smiling face showing how proud he was of his project at the science fair.
Well done little man.
This was his final crystal garden with much more color!
Well done little man.
Science is pretty cool. It's kind of like magic!
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