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Science Lab

Grab

Epsom salts

Food coloring

Wooden matchsticks

Clear soda

Black paper

Baby oil or mineral oil

Dish soap

Raisins

Pie plates

Plastic bottle with cap

Pepper

Go

For your first experiment, cut a piece of black construction paper to fit in the bottom of a pie plate. Stir one tablespoon of Epsom salts into ¼ cup of water until dissolved. Place the black paper in the pie plate and pour the liquid over it. Place the plate in the sun to dry. Once the water has evaporated, spiky salt crystals will have formed on the black paper.

While you’re waiting for your salt crystals to form, start working on your second experiment. Fill a plastic bottle three-fourths full of baby oil or mineral oil. Stir food coloring into a cup of water. Fill the remainder of the bottle of oil with the colored water. Cap the bottle tightly, and have your daughter tip the bottle over to see colorful “blobs” move through the oil.

For experiment number three, fill a glass pie plate with water. Place several wooden matchsticks on the water. Have your daughter squeeze a drop of dish soap in the middle of the pie plate. Have fun watching the matchsticks shoot across the water. Fill the pie plate with fresh water and try this one again, this time sprinkling pepper into the water rather than matchsticks. The pepper will “run away” from the dish soap.

For your fourth experiment, fill a cup with clear soda such as 7–Up or Sprite. Drop in a few raisins and watch them bob up and down in the soda as carbonation bubbles attach to them.

Grow

Just as our God never changes, he has set laws over his creation that do not change either. The sun rises and sets each day, a tomato seed produces a tomato, and a ball thrown into the air will eventually come down again.

God chose to reveal truths about himself in the world that he made. Anyone who has seen the earth has seen clues about the nature of God himself!

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. (Rom. 1:20)

God wants all men to know him. In his kindness he has shown how real he is through the world he made. No one will be able to say that God could not be found!

A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again.

Enid Bagnold

Dear Father,

Thank you for your great love. You have shown yourself to us in so many ways—through the Bible, the testimony of other believers, the story of Jesus in history, and creation itself. Please give us eyes to see you in the world all around us. Teach us to appreciate the study of science as a way to see your hand in creation. You are awesome! Amen.