Kid's Science Experiments-Inertia

(Let's think of the beloved table as "rustic," shall we?)

My calling in the Scouts program is the Cub Committee Chair, so I don't get to do the den meetings every week. The couple that is over the Webelos just had a baby so they are on "maternity leave" until the end of the month. It has been so much fun doing den meeting. We have been doing the science section and have found some fun things to do. I did them later with my own kids and they loved them. I don't know that they really understood the explanation of the experiment, but it was fun to see something happen that is unexpected.

The first experiment we took a stack of nickels (and a big thank you to Palmer's piggy bank), and flicked a penny at the bottom nickel. When the penny hits it the bottom nickel shoots out of the stack and the rest of them stay there. Before we did the experiment the kids guessed what they thought would happen and they all thought the pile would fall over. After we did it we talked about "Inertia". Inertia was discovered by Sir Isaac Newton.
The kids loved this experiment and did it over and over again.
The next one we did was to get a bottle (I got some Starbucks Frapachino bottles from Target. I dumped the contents down the sink and now we have some cute little bottles, that will and have been used a ton). I cut out a little card of cardstock and set it on the bottle opening, then set the nickel on top of the card. If you flick the card straight out the nickel falls into the bottle. Way fun, the kids loved it.
If the flick up the whole thing just falls.
This was the favorite experiment (the bottle got really grimy because we had to do it so many times to get it to work). We did 3 or 4 others, but these are all I am going to show (go get a scout book! Tons of fun ideas in there!) This was an experiment in Atmospheric Pressure. I talked to my kids about Inertia because the concept was pretty simple, we didn't really talk about Atmospheric pressure, it was a little over their heads.

This experiment has to be timed just right or it doesn't work. I did it with the scouts 3 times before it worked. It was pretty fun having it not work because we could tweak it the next time and try something different. We were so excited when we did it right! Good thing I had enough boiled eggs. I am thinking we are going to do this a bunch after Easter :)
First boil some eggs. Then get your bottle again (these bottles were PERFECT), get a small square of newspaper and fold it in the same direction three times. Light it on fire (the scouts and my boys LOVED this part), then drop it in the bottle (don't blow it out) and IMMEDIATELY (like really fast or this doesn't work) set the boiled egg on the top of the bottle. The egg with begin to bounce and then get sucked into the bottle. It was so cool, cool enough that we did it again for Dad when he came home. Science is so much fun and kids really like it. I think it is a great activity to do together!