What do you do when the schools are closed because it's too cold for the buses to run and too cold for kids to wait outside? Okay, besides homeschooling? Make snow!
I heard about this experiment from the dental hygienist who cleaned my teeth yesterday, so I decided to give it a try. When I posted my findings on Facebook, several friends told me they tried it too, but only got steam. So here's my unretouched video "proof" that you can make snow from boiling water. We planned on catching the snow in the black cloth (my old midshipman neckerchief) but the wind catches it and it rises until it dissipates. Notice the lovely way the children interact with each other (yet more proof that homeschooled kids are "normal") and the cold-proofing we did of the downstairs bathroom vent to try to prevent freezing pipes of last winter. (Which, by the way, worked!)
By the way, the temperature was hovering around 0 degrees F, which, for my metric friends is -18 degrees C!
Another friend told me to try blowing soap bubbles. They were supposed to shatter like glass bubbles when they hit the ground. It wasn't quite so dramatic as that. They appeared more like plastic bubbles when they froze and they usually popped before they hit the ground. But some of them we could see were beginning to grow leafy ice patterns on them as they danced about in the air. We tried to make a video of them, but you can't quite see the beautiful frosty patterns. As you can see, if you don't blow the soap bubbles out fast enough, the soap will freeze right on your soap wand.
Notice the wonderful soap wands we used: an old toilet paper tube--it worked best once it was fully saturated in soap solution; the plastic frame from a grocery card; and a plastic part from a K'nex set! (The toilet paper tube worked the best). We made homemade soap bubbles with about 3/4 cup of water and a huge squirt of Ivory liquid.
