A simple science experiment with lemons

I got this simple science experiment from The snails trail a great pre school blog that I follow.

What you need:

2 Lemons, baking soda and liquid soap

Apparently, there is some suggestion that if you roll a lemon and squash it a little, before squeezing, the extraction of juice is easier, and you get more...we set out to find if this was true.

Experiment 1.

Using the instruction sheet prepared my momma snail (see link above), Henry got about trying to figure out what we needed to do this

experiment.

As a bit of fun, I dressed him in one of Kevin's old white work shirts and he wore a pair of Kevin's reading glasses as goggles!

I cut the first lemon in half, then Henry got

squeezing "pretty hard...mummy you do it" was Henry's answer. So i squeezed

all I could and got about 1fluid oz of juice.

Henry then rolled and squashed the second lemon, after which i cut it in half. Henry once again got squeezing....so i asked "is this any easier"...he replied "no its harder!" so much for the hypothesis of this experiment! It was pretty hard for him to squeeze the lemons, so once again i finished the squeezing and Henry recorded his observations....

There was a tiny amount more squeezed from the rolled lemon. But it was just as hard to squeeze both.

Experiment 2.

The second experiment was a little more exciting, as we promised Henry an explosion of sorts!

This time we were going to see whether we could create lemon suds!

To start with i had Henry make a prediction about what was going to happen and record that idea. He thought there would be bubbly lemon juice.

With daddy's help we got started on this one.

We placed 1 teaspoon of baking soda in a glass, added a teaspoon of washing up liquid, then poured in the juice from one of the lemons.

Quickly stirring, Henry's excitement grew quite quickly as the bubbles and froth headed towards the top of the glass and then over flowed!

Daddy, ever the scientist wanted to see what happened with a tablespoon of each of the ingredients and a whole lot of lemon juice...the result, a table covered in white frothy bubbles and a giggling Henry....boys will be boys!

The data sheets from the experiment