UNSCHOOLING LABORATORY: HOMEMADE CHEMICAL EXPERIMENTS WITH MY SON (diy instruction)

Welcome to our homemade chemical laboratory, guys! Here my son and me have made some nice experiments that illustrate basical natural processes well.

My son is only 6 now, but he often asks me to make experiments. He like to mix something, to see what will be, how different substabces will "work" together.
I'm glad he has his own interests already and I try to develop them as much as I can. Our homemade laboratory is one of the ways to do it interesting and joyful.

This time we made 2 experiments that show cool phenomena.

The 1st one is called 'Extinguished Fire"

How to make an extinguished match to light again without any fire nearby??

It looks like a juggle, but it's a clear natural phenomenon!

We take:

1. hydrogen peroxide
2. potassium permanganate

then we mix them in a glass.
The reaction goes immediately! And my son likes looking when something is seething and hissing:)

Then we take an extinguished match or any wooden stick and put it inside this very glass - Yahoo! the stick will light again by itself!
Looks wonderful!

The 2nd experiment is called "Omnipresent starch"

Do you know starch is really almost anywhere now, even in products in which there must be none of it?

It's easy to test it and see its presence by your own eyes.
A very famous experiment with iodine that we all made at school.
My son doesn't go there, so he has discovered it at home much earlier than schoolkids.

We take water and some drops of iodine and mix them.
And we take a glass with water, one more glass.

Then we need starch. If you have it from the market - fine. I had it too but it was much more interesting for my son to get it by himself:)

We took a piece of bread and put it into a plate with water.

Starch from bread went out there (but for my son it wasn't so clear so it was just bread + water), and we add this water with starch to our glass.

Now we need just to see whether there is starch in the water with bread.
We mix iodine water and water with bread = tadaaaam the water will become grey or even black (amount of starch defines the colour).

And it was a great surprise for my son to see the colour changed at once. Miracles in the glass;)

But it was clear there was starch in bread.

Then we took ketchup of my hubby and tested it too.

No starch had to be there, just tomatoes, but it's a fairytale;)
Of course, it became black at once too!

I explained all we we were making to my boy to let him understand what we saw and why. Otherwise it would be just a cool game with mixing something;) For his age it's a great game but he wanted to have experiments, so we made it interesting but useful too.

He was so happy to see he succeeded and saw something new in his glasses;) And how happy he was to retell what he did to his Dad, especially about his favourite ketchup:))

I hope our experiments will be useful for you DIY-chemistry with kids at home;)