Girl Scout Home Scientist Day

On Saturday, November 22nd, Addy earned her Home Scientist Brownie badge.

Pretty much all of the Brownie Skill Builder badges have 5 steps that need to be completed to earn them & the Home Scientist badge is no exception. So my co leader Lori & I set up a Home Scientist Day for our troop so that the girls could knock out all 5 steps at once!

One of the 5 steps is to Dive Into Density. We chose the lemon & lime experiment.

My co-leader Lori lead this event. She filled a vase with water & dropped a lime in it. It sunk.

But when she dropped the lemon in the vase, guess what... it floated!

We also tested some other fruits, including an apple, and guess what they did... they all floated.

Why you ask??? Because even though they are all similar in size & shape, limes are denser than water & the other fruits (at least the ones we tested) are not.

Another step to earning the badge is to Be a Kitchen Chemist. 

We did this by having the girls make ice cream!

The girls measured out sugar, vanilla & half and half & then poured the ingredients into a small ziploc bag. They took that bag and put it inside a larger ziploc bag that contained ice & rock salt. Then they shook, shook & shook the bag some more, until their ice cream was as thick as they wanted it to be.

Most of them were impatient & their arms got sore from all the shaking, lol, so their ice cream ended up being more like milkshakes.

The ice cream/milkshakes tasted pretty good. Even my picky little Addy liked it!

Our next experiment was to Make Something Bubble Up, so to do this we took all the girls (and Alex) outside.

And tried the ever fun mentos in the Coke bottle experiment!

Unfortunately, most of the mentos kept falling off the tape & so our geyser did not get very big :(

Another step for the badge is to Create Static Electricity. The girls did this by rubbing balloons against their hair. Then they used the balloons to make salt & pepper dance & to move ping pong balls around the table.

And the last step in earning the badge was to Play With Science and we did this by making giant homemade bubbles.

The girls used yarn & plastic straws to make bubble wands & dish soap, cornstarch & water to make the bubble solution.

The bubbles were hard to make but the girls had a lot of fun trying!

I think our Home Scientist Day was a great success! I'm loving the Brownie Skill Builder Badges (much more than the Daisy petals) and look forward to working on more of them with our girls!