Red Cabbage juice!

We didn't do much science (or art, or anything non-Christmas related) during December. The kids were so interested in Christmas, that they wanted to do Christmas craft projects, baking, holiday fairs, holiday adventures. Even their pretend play was heavily holiday related (wrapping gifts for each other). However, on one rather nice weekend afternoon, I made some red cabbage juice and set up a "kitchen" for the kids to play outside.

Red Cabbage juice is pretty easy to make. Boil red cabbage for 10 minutes or so, strain out cabbage and the liquid remaining is stinky, but fun!

Red cabbage juice acts as a litmus test. It starts off a grape purple color. Add baking soda, and it turns blue, add vinegar and it turns red. Mix the red and blue together, get purple fizz! If you add a drop or two of dish soap, you get purple foam instead (the soap helps trap the gas released from the reaction, so you get a better visual reaction).

 

I showed the girls the basics and explained briefly the how and why. Then, I let them play! They were both pretty fascinated with the experiment. Nora turned a bunch of juice varying shades of red, and then added baking soda to make fizz in reds and purples, depending on how acidic the juice was to start. Beth mostly just wanted to see the fizz, so she kept dumping vinegar straight onto baking soda and really didn't care as much about the juice.