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STEAM Saturday: Ice Experiments

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Did you know that salt lowers the temperature of ice water? To see this process happen, try making ice cream with only a few ingredients.

Materials Needed:
  • 1 Gallon Zip Bag
  • 2 Sandwich Zip Bags
  • 1/3 Cup Rock Salt
  • 1/2 Cup Whole Milk
  • 1 Tablespoon Sugar
  • 1/2 Teaspoon Vanilla Extract
  • Ice (enough to fill 1/2 of the gallon zip bag)
  • Gloves
Homemade ice cream ingredients.
Instructions:
  1. In one sandwich zip bag, combine the milk, sugar, and vanilla extract together. Then, zip the bag close.
  2. Put the zipped bag with the mixture in the second sandwich zip bag and zip this one closed. This gives your mixture extra protection.
  3. In the gallon zipped bag, make sure there is enough ice to fill 1/2 of the bag. Then, add the rock salt to the ice.
  4. Place your sandwich zip bags with the mixture into the gallon zip bag of ice and salt. The, zip the gallon zip bag close.
  5. Put on your gloves and shake your gallon zip bag for 10 minutes.
  6. After 10 minutes, take you sandwich bags out and open them to tasty vanilla ice cream.

There are many different recipes to make ice cream like this on the internet. We found this one on the Happy Toddler Blog.

Lift Ice Cubes with Chemistry

After making your tasty treat, learn more about salt and ice including why it is used on snowy roads in the winter. You can even learn how to make a piece of yarn to stick to ice with this experiment from Scientific American.

ice stuck to piece of yarn
Photo credit to Scientific American

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