Tag Archives: experiment

Fun and games, valuable lessons

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Once a week we will be featuring a fun and/or educational activity you can try at home or in the classroom. There are several games on our website you and your children can play together to learn more about Heifer International – perfect for a scorching hot summer day.

Can you balance the cost of a Heifer donation with the cost of things you might have around your house? If we all give something up, it can impact the world! It only takes a little to change lives in a big way, as you will see when you play this game that compares the cost of a Heifer Animal to items most of you have, such as video games and DVDs.

Try your hand and brains on crossword puzzles using vocabulary words we use every day here at Heifer. You can either play them online or print them out for a fun group activity.

If word searches are more your style, we’ve got those too. Kids love digging up the words hidden in these Heifer Word Search puzzles. While they unearth words from the letters, they learn about the environment, animals, the world around them and more.

We’ve also got you covered for fun, educational experiments. Try any of these and tell us all about it. We may just include your experiment in a future blog post!

Taking Out the Trash — Where Does It Really Go?

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Once a week we will be featuring a fun and/or educational activity you can try at home or in the classroom.

Animals forage in trash on the southern edge of Port-au-Prince.

Animals forage in trash on the southern edge of Port-au-Prince, eight months following the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that stuck January 12, 2010. Heifer International is part of the recovery efforts there.

With Earth Day only a week away — April 22 —  my mind is on garbage and what it does to our awesome planet. This experiment is a great way to find out what happens to garbage when we throw it in the trash.

When we throw something “away” does it really go away? What kinds of garbage break down the easiest? The fastest? The most? Let’s find out.

What you need:

  • A plastic container (like a yogurt cup)
  • 3 types of garbage (for example: vegetable peels, egg shells, mushrooms, nut shells, paper, aluminum foil or plastic)
  • Soil (from your yard, not potting soil)

Directions:

  • Fill a plastic container halfway with soil.
  • Add a little water, but only enough to make the soil wet, not watery.
  • Bury three kinds of garbage in the soil, one from each of the sets below:
    1. Vegetable peelings, bread, food leftovers
    2. Egg shells, nut shells, paper
    3. Aluminum foil, plastic, a penny
  • Make a list of the garbage and check it every day for changes.
  • Be sure the soil stays damp. Add a teaspoon of water each day, if necessary.

Make a chart to record your observations. Which materials break down the fastest, the most and the easiest? Which materials show no signs of breaking down?

After this experiment, think about the garbage you throw away. What can you do to lessen the materials that are hardest to break down? One way to lessen the materials is to compost. We will be offering several composting activities in the upcoming months like this blog post about worm bins and their valuable fertilizer.

Or read this article about food waste in America and what you can do about it.

You can find this and many other fun and informative activities in the Classroom Resources section of Heifer International’s website.

An Eggs-periment to Test the Strength of a Shell

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Once a week we will be featuring an activity you can try at home or in the classroom. This week’s entry is written by Linda Meyers, with technical know-how and research provided by Liz Elmore, School Programs Intern at Heifer International.

If you have been reading the blog lately you have probably read how much a chicken or rabbit can do for a family in need. If you haven’t, you’ll want to check out a few of the posts, especially this one with an ultra-cool Easter infographic.

Eggs are definitely on our minds this time of year, so we thought it would be a great time to try this mind-bending eggs-periment that will surprise you with its amazing results.

Just how strong do you think an eggs is? To test the strength, try this eggs-tra eggs-iting eggs-periment:

You will need:

  • 4 eggs
  • A towel
  • A pile of books

Directions

  • Crack each egg in half. Put the yolks and whites in a container and store for future use. (Set the pointy half of the shells aside, and after the experiment, you can compost them along with the rest of the shells.)
  • Place a towel on a flat surface and position the eggs on top to make a square, with the dome side of the egg on top.
  • Add books one by one on top of the egg shells so that the weight is distributed evenly.

How many books do you think the eggs can hold before they crack?

Do you think egg shells can protect the insides of an egg?

Eggshell Strength Explained: Just like the Capitol building, eggs contain the shape of a dome.  Did you ever wonder how such a seemingly fragile object like an eggshell can protect the developing embryos of so many animals? In fact, the arched shape of the eggshell is seen in many types of architecture, including bridges and domed buildings. Not only are they architecturally pleasing, domes and arches are very strong, because f the  material they are made of, and their shape. The eggshell of a chicken is composed of layers of calcium carbonate reinforced by a protein matrix. The arched, dome shape of an eggshell can resist the pressure of heavy loads by distributing weight evenly along the structure of the egg. Compression is a force applied to the outside of an object that pushes toward the object’s center, while tension is a pulling, stretching force. Eggshells are tension-weak materials, but are strong in compression. This is why it is difficult to crush an egg by squeezing on its ends (compression forces), but will break when chicks peck from the inside of the egg (tension forces).  So how strong can an eggshell really be? One unbroken eggshell has held up a 200-pound person!

For this and other fun, educational experiments go to the Experiments page on our website.

Now that you know the true strength an egg shell, you may want to learn more about how eggs bring strength to the effort to stop hunger and poverty across the globe.