Our First Official Science Experiment: Which Liquid Best Cleans a Penny

I love Science and I love watching my little ones make discovery's and learn together!  Wednesdays are Science Experiment days in our house.  Our first official Science Experiment was discovering which liquid would best clean a dirty penny!  Oliver(4) and Ellie(3) were excited to get our their dirty penny's and put on their Science aprons to get started. 

I gathered our three liquids and labeled them with different colors (for my kids who can't read yet). I then laid out three glass bowls where we would place the penny's.

 I had the kids make predictions about which liquid they thought would best clean the penny and then taped their predictions on the bottle that they chose. 

Teaching Tip: Displaying labels for kids who can't yet read is a really important part of exposing them to written language and helps them develop their language and letter/sound recognition skills. It's never to early to expose your young children to the language of Science.  Talk to them about the Scientific process and "what scientists do," this language will just become a normal part of their science experience.

I created a simple worksheet and displayed it on their "Science Clipboards." Having a special clipboard helps them to feel like real Scientists and adds to the experience.  On this page I drew a happy and sad face under each liquid choice.  When the experiment was through I had them circle the happy face if the liquid cleaned the penny and a sad face if it didn't.

The kids both had a lot of fun pouring the liquids in bowl and then dropping in the penny's!  We let them sit on the counter for 4 hours, throughout the morning, and kept returning to see the progress and talk about our earlier predictions.  They were both very excited to see if their predictions were working.

When the time was up we took the penny's out and they made their observations.  We used a magnifying glass to get a close up look at our experiment:) They wanted to use their cleaning sponges to give them an extra shine and then we sat down at the table and recorded our observations on the worksheet.  We also taped two penny's to our worksheet so we could compare the before and after.

 Oliver was excited when his prediction was correct.  This was also a great opportunity to talk about how Scientists are often wrong in their predictions and are able to try their experiments multiple times. In Science we learn from our mistakes!

Things Learned Today:

1. How to make predictions
2. How to make observations
3. How to record our observations
4. How to work together