In science club this week, we wanted to investigate whether or not we could bend a liquid. The children had great discussion time and came up with some great hypotheses. Among them were;
Riley – ‘’ Can we freeze metal in water and then bend the ice?’’
Cody – ‘’That might work but then it wouldn’t be liquid because ice is a solid’’
Oska created a hole in a dish with a lid, but that only changed the angle of the flow. We tried lots of ideas and then I introduced balloons. Charlotte thought we could use them to rub on our hair but wasn’t sure how we could get the water to bend. Numerous attempts later, the children had fun making coloured slime using food colouring, cooking oil and corn starch and mixed it to a runny consistency. The children worked in pairs, one rubbed the balloon on their hair and the other poured gloop adjacent to the balloon. The slime was electric!
The science behind the fun
When you rub some objects, like balloons, they gain electricity. This electricity stays in the objects, so this is called ”static” which means something stays in the same place. Static electricity has amazing power to attract things – even running water! Water contains both positive and negative charged particles and is neutral. Positive and negative charges re attracted to each other so when you move the negatively charged balloon towards the stream, it attracts the water’s positively charged particles and the stream bends