Science Experiment: Elephant’s Toothpaste
For our science experiment today, we made elephant’s toothpaste. We made the kid-friendly version using hydrogen peroxide (3%), yeast, food coloring, and dish soap. Even though we didn’t use the 6% hydrogen peroxide as suggested by the recipe, we were still able to create a reaction, but just a little bit slower. Nevertheless, the kids loved the overflowing bubbles.
Matthew getting ready to pour the yeast mixture (catalyst) into the hydrogen peroxide, food coloring, and dish soap mixture.
The reaction is now in motion and the boys are anxiously waiting for more bubbles.
More bubbles.
As usual, I have Matthew write a short page of what he had just learned in his science notebook, and this is what he wrote:
I learned that the yeast acts as a catalyst, which makes the hydrogen peroxide release oxygen faster.
The boys enjoyed the experiment so much that we did three different ones with blue, red, and green food coloring.
-
3 Comments so far
Leave a commentYour children are just so ADORABLE!!
That sounds like a great experiment. I bet the kids loved it.
Having been a chemistry teacher (college), I was very excited to see that you are doing science experiments
like this. You could also do an experiment where you would substitute another powder in place of the yeast to see if it would do the same thing. This would help them see that the yeast was necessary. Of course at this stage an experiment that doesn’t show anything exciting wouldn’t be as interesting.
Keep up the good work.
HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
