North Carolina is nicknamed the “Tar Heel state,” I read a couple of reasons for this but it all boiled down to there is a lot of tar there. Tar was originally used for water-proofing boats. I don’t have any boats to try water-proofing with, but I have paper.
North Carolina Tar Heel State
First, I smeared the various things that have been used for water-proofing onto the papers and let that soak in for a while (I gave it about 30 minutes).
Then each of the kids got to take turns putting water with an eye dropper onto the various pieces of paper.
As you can see it was very exciting results. I was even surprised by some of them.
I wasn’t too surprised the butter and oil repelled water, those I expected because they were used in the colonial time periods to make cheap semi-translucent window coverings that were somewhat waterproof. The paint also didn’t surprise me because we used paint to seal wood against water for our houses. The rubber glue and the Elmer’s glue did surprise me. Elmer’s because it is water-soluble, and the rubber cement because I only put on a very thin layer.
Of course the plain old paper immediately soaked up the water. I want to repeat the experiment and keep checking back to see if it has soaked in, that was my original plan, but some of the papers were thrown away right away.
How about you guys? Anything fun this week? Any surprising new discoveries?
We have been reading books about fish, visiting our local aquarium, and gearing up for the start of Project Feeder Watch.
Your tinkering/early experimenting reminds me of Tinker Lab's open ended experiential learning projects.
Awesome activity and thanks for hosting =)
Great experiment. We sort of had a little bit of it drawing with watercolors over crayon paintings and seeing how they repel water.
This is a cool experiment! The house I lived in for the first seven years of my life had a flat tar-covered roof, and I remember watching them put the tar on!
Very cools experiment!
Oh! I like this 🙂 You could fold the papers into boats and see which one could stay afloat longest…yes, I'm going to have to try that eventually.
Fun experiment! I like Leah's idea to make paper boats too!
I just visited the link about the muppets printables. Um, no science there. I left a comment. Weird. I'm going to check out some of these other links for good science ideas; we haven't done many projects lately.
Thanks for the link-up. I'm following you and hope to post more science in the future!