Wednesday

We covered acids and bases in class today. Last night I bought a head of red cabbage. Then I chopped it up into little pieces, put it in a pan, covered the cabbage with water. The water boiled for ten minutes. I removed the pan from the heat and let it cool down a little bit. Then I strained out the cabbage and was left with a lovely blue liquid. When you add a drop or two of the liquid to different materials you can tell if the other materials are a base, acid, or anywhere in between. Acids come with a redder color - tonic water is an acid. Neutral is blue and a base is more of a greenish yellow color. We experimented with soap, cranberry juice, perfume, rubbing alcohol, and many other substances to find out if they were an acid or a base. We also did a short experiment with boiling water and very cold water. The students made an hypothesis; which temperature of water would have food coloring integrate the fastest. We dropped in the food coloring and the result was dramatic. Good experiment to try at home.