For those of you who are coming in late, and don't know what I'm talking about, you can click back to our last Science Sunday post, when we started out trying, and failing, at an experiment inspired by Vickie Cobb -from her book We Dare You! Hundreds of Fun Science Bets, Challenges, and Experiments You Can Do At Home.
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We hypothesised, that perhaps our magnet wasn't strong enough to pull the iron out through the goop. But, after testing the magnet, with a washer, we decided that was not our problem. And, in case you were wondering, we used a magnet wand, that came with our Klutz Exporabook (you can find it at http://www.klutz.com/, or possibly for less at Amazon).
Our next thought was, that the problem was with the cereal we were using. We chose Rice Krispies, because it had the highest level of iron per serving, out of all the cereals in our cupboard. My son, being a good Montanan, decided it was some sort of government conspiracy, and there is not iron in cereal at all. I decided to try Fruit Loops.
At first, we returned to the Vikki Cobb method, of crushing the cereal, and putting the magnet right into it. The magnet came out covered in cereal dust, but nothing that looked black, or seemed particularly metallic.
And, what we discovered, is that the bits of iron are so tiny, we weren't separating them from the cereal, so they appeared to be regular cereal crumbs. However, the nonmetallic crumbs stayed on the paper, while the ones with tiny pieces of iron in them jumped up to our magnet.
It's good to be a homeschooler.
5 comments:
Great perseverance! Well done :)
I am impressed with your perseverance. Aren't you worried that your kids lose taste for Rice Krispies forever? LOL
Awesome! Glad you stuck with it!
ROCK ON MAMMA! This experiment turned out to be more about the scientific method than getting the iron out of the cereal- you are SUCH a good teacher!
Perseverance pays off! I'm impressed you kept trying and trying.
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