Shanice – interview

Today our first experiment is all indictors. Now we looked at these on Monday so let’s just
do a quick recap.

WHAT IS PH?

The pH scale is a scale that is used to tell us how acidic or basic something is, based on the
amount of hydrogen ions activity in a substance.

The pH scale is based around pH 7, which is neutral and represents substances that are
neither an acid nor a base and the scale goes from 0-14.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcuU5ASd2SU
The Basis For The pH Scale

Even if you’re not intimately familiar with the concepts of acids and bases, you certainly
have some exposure to them. We even deal with some of them on a daily basis. Basic
substances are things like baking soda, while acidic substances are things like orange juice,
soda and even on Monday we talked about lime. Can you remember what colour it turned
the blue indictor paper ?

Now we’re going to watch a video on ph in our everyday life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3hirzlWILM&ab_channel=Don%27tMemorise

While there are some substances that can fall outside the 0 to 14 pH range, most solutions
fall within this range, and therefore the pH scale is usually represented as running from 0 to
14, with basic substances being any value above seven and acidic substances any value
below neutral 7.

Substances which lie at the far ends of the pH scale, either extremely basic or extremely
acidic substances can be quite harmful to organic material, doing substantial damage to
cells. Both highly basic and highly acidic substances can be corrosive in nature and can
burn your skin . The pH of the solution, how much of it gets on you and how long they are
exposed to it, are all factors that determine how much damage the substance will do. Our
stomachs also contain acid but our stomach has cells that protect it from this .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mh9evMLxk4&ab_channel=LabRaps

DO EXPERIMENT

Use the cabbage water to test the following solution :

1. Pour about 50ml of the purple liquid into a glass and add some vinegar. The liquid
will change colour!

2. Repeat step 5 with the other substances(Vinegar, Lemon juice ,Water Laundry
detergent, baking soda, bleach solution)

3. using a fresh glass for each one. Let the children guess which are acids and which
are bases.
 4. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can also pour a little of the cabbage juice into a
glass and use a straw to blow some bubbles through it for about a minute. The juice
will gradually change colour!

What you have made is called a pH indicator. It can tell you whether something is an acid
or a base, as well as how acidic or basic it is, based on how much the color changes. Think
of acids and bases as opposites—acids have a low pH and bases have a high pH. An
indicator is typically a chemical that changes color if it comes in contact with an acid or a
base.

As you can see, the purple cabbage juice turns red when it mixes with something acidic and
turns green when it mixes with something basic. Red cabbage juice is considered to be an
indicator because it shows us something about the chemical composition of other
substances.

What is it about cabbage that causes this to happen? Red cabbage contains a water-soluble
pigment called anthocyanin that changes color when it is mixed with an acid or a base. The
pigment turns red in acidic environments with a pH less than 7 and the pigment turns
bluish-green in alkaline (basic) environments with a pH greater than 7.

Red cabbage is just one of many indicators that are available to scientists. Some indicators
start out colorless and turn different colors when they mix with an acid or a base. If there is
no color change at all, the substance that you are testing is probably neutral, just like water.

Interview Rashad

Recap animals

Make a puppet .

Play animal, place and thing ( name an animal , something they remember about that
animals and where it can be found(habitat )
Okay our next experiment has to do with something called electromagnets. But before
we get to electromagnets we need to talk about magnets. 

Does anyone know what a magnet is?

A magnet is any material or object that produces a magnetic field. 

Now you must be asking yourselves, what exactly is a magnetic field? Well, a magnetic
field is an invisible region of space that surrounds a magnet. It explains how the magnetic
forces around that magnet act.

Graphic showing the magnetic field around a bar magnet

This kind of magnet is known as a bag magnet, which makes sense because it does look
like a bar, it has a rectangular shape.

Those black lines that you see are called the magnetic field lines, they show how the
magnetic field behaves. Each line has an arrowhead on it which indicates the direction in
which each line is going. You can imagine each line coming out of the “N” and going into
the “S”. 

How many lines can you see coming out of the “N”?

There are 11 lines in this graphic, but what if I told you that in fact, there are countless
magnetic field lines? Of course it would be tedious, or quite frankly impossible to draw
them all, so we just draw a few of the lines to get an idea of what is going on.

Now, let’s talk about the “N” and “S” that you guys see. 

Does anyone want to take a guess as to what they mean? 

(Hint: Think of Antarctica)

The “N” stands for the north pole and the “S” stands for the south pole. All magnets have
these two poles, and they are opposing. 

Video about magnetism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXCeuSiTOug

Magnetism and electricity are forces generated by the movement of electrons. They are
electromagnetic forces – moving electrically charged particles produce magnetic forces,
and moving magnets produce electric forces.

You will need

A large iron nail (about 3 inches)
About 3 feet of THIN COATED copper wire
A fresh D size battery
Some paper clips or other small magnetic objects
What to do
1. Leave about 8 inches of wire loose at one end and wrap most of the rest of the wire
around the nail. Try not to overlap the wires.
2. Cut the wire (if needed) so that there is about another 8 inches loose at the other end too.
3. Now remove about an inch of the plastic coating from both ends of the wire and attach
the one wire to one end of a battery and the other wire to the other end of the battery. See
picture below. (It is best to tape the wires to the battery – be careful though, the wire could
get very hot!)
4. Now you have an ELECTROMAGNET! Put the point of the nail near a few paper clips
and it should pick them up!
NOTE: Making an electromagnet uses up the battery somewhat quickly which is why the
battery may get warm, so disconnect the wires when you are done exploring.
How does it work?
Most magnets, like the ones on many refrigerators, cannot be turned off, they are called
permanent magnets. Magnets like the one you made that can be turned on and off, are
called ELECTROMAGNETS. They run on electricity and are only magnetic when the
electricity is flowing. The electricity flowing through the wire arranges the molecules in the
nail so that they are attracted to certain metals. NEVER get the wires of the electromagnet
near at household outlet! Be safe – have fun!
Back a few decades ago, before hydrogen peroxide was the go-to treatment for minor
scrapes and cuts, adults would make kids sit through the agony of putting iodine on their
injuries. Peroxide stings, but there are no words for how iodine hurts when you put it on a
big scrape. A mixture of a small amount of iodine into water is an excellent (if painful)
antiseptic, but it can do other things, too. It’s also a really good chemical indicator and we
talked about indicators this week. Do you remember an indicator we talked about ?
( universal indicator and cabbage as an indicator ). Today we’ll be using the iodine as our
indicator .We’re going to do what’s called a starch test, to see how much starch is in a few
different food items.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARXSnu8ImqQ

Materials:

 A bottle of iodine (you can still get it at the pharmacy)

 Rice (Minute Rice works best)
 Apple slices
 Potato slices
 A slice of bread
 A leaf of lettuce
 An eye dropper
 A plate
 Paper towels or newspaper

Process:

1. First you need to set up your experimental area. Iodine stains all sorts of stuff, so we
want to stay clean. First, lay down a couple of layers of paper towel, then put your
plate down on top.
2. Suck some iodine up into your eyedropper. Most iodine solutions you can buy are a
deep orangey-yellow, and that’s important here.
3. Cook your rice (it needs to be cooked for the experiment to work) and then lay out
all of the other foods you’ll be testing for starch.
4. Your test is simple: squeeze a few drops of the iodine onto the food. What happens?
You should notice a remarkable color change in some of the food items. That
change means that there’s starch present in that food. The darker the resulting color,
the more starch there is. Which foods had a lot of starch, and which didn’t?
5. Brainstorm other foods (and even drinks!) to try. Milk? Soda? Salt? Sugar? Onion?
A chicken nugget? Just make sure you don’t eat or drink anything after you test it
for starch!
6. Clean up very carefully! You don’t want to get any iodine on your clothes or your
carpet!

Summary
As you probably noticed, when you dropped some iodine on the potato, the rice, and the
bread, it went from orangey-yellow to dark blue or black. That’s how you know there’s
starch in that food. Iodine indicates the presence of the chemical starch, which is why it’s
called a chemical indicator.

Starch is a major component of plants and is also a type of nutrient for animals called a
carbohydrate. It’s made of up chains of a substance called glucose, a sugar that’s an
important fuel for almost all life forms. Even though it’s important to plants, different
plants, and different parts of those plants, tend to have more starch in them than others.

A potato is the root of the potato plant, while lettuce, even though it’s a vegetable, is a leaf.
Leaves don’t contain as much starch as a nice thick root like a potato. An apple, on the
other hand, is a fruit. It has some starch before it’s ripe, but sweet ripe fruits contain a sugar
called fructose and very little glucose, so they don’t cause the iodine to react.

The reason iodine changes color when it contacts starch is still kind of a mystery. Scientists
think that the reason has to do with the shape of some of the starch molecules. Some of
them are long branching chains, and some are straight chains of round coils. These ones are
called amylose. What seems to be happening is that the iodine molecules fit perfectly inside
the coils of amylose, which changes how the amylose absorbs and reflects light, giving it a
blue or black color instead of whatever color it was before. It’s kind of crazy that
something you can do so easily in your kitchen is still kind of a mystery, but if there
weren’t any mysteries left then we wouldn’t need science anymore!