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Make your Own Crystals | Fizzics Education

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Make your own Crystals

Make your own Crystals

Follow FizzicsEd 150 Science Experiments:

You Will Need:

  • Adult help
  • Three cups of table salt.
  • 1L of water
  • One Pencil
  • 1 Paperclip
  • A piece of string, cut to size.
  • One strong plastic or Pyrex jar.

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Grow Salt Crystals science experiment - materials needed
1 pouring hot water into a container

Boil the water with the help of an adult.

Pour the water into the plastic jar. Do not use glass as it may break.

2 Grow Salt Crystals science experiment - adding salt

Add the salt one table spoon at a time. Allowing the salt to dissolve before you add more table spoons.

Continue adding salt until you cannot dissolve anymore and it collects at the bottom of the jar.

3 Grow Salt Crystals science experiment - salt crystal growing

Tie one end of the string around the pencil and the other end around the paperclip.

Dangle the string into the saturated salt solution, so that the paperclip doesn’t touch the bottom of the jar or its sides.

4

Allow the jar to sit undisturbed for one week. Salt crystals should form at the top of the string

5 Pouring a dirty water mixture in a clear plastic cup into another clear plastic cup that has a simple paper filter across its top (held in place by a rubber band)

Get the Unit of Work on Mixtures here!

  • How can we separate mixtures?
  • What are the different techniques?
  • From chromatography to magnetism, join us to explore the variety of ways we can separate mixtures!

Includes cross-curricular teaching ideas, student quizzes, a sample marking rubric, scope & sequences & more

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6
7 Teacher showing how to do an experiment outside to a group of kids.

Online courses for teachers & parents

– Help students learn how science really works

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Why Does This Happen:

The crystals could only stay dissolved when the water was hot. Cooling the solution down made it supersaturated, which is unstable. You should have found that the water travelled up the string through a process called capillary action, bringing the salt with it. As the water evaporated on the string, salt crystals were left behind.

A supersaturated solution is a solution that has more material dissolved in it then it would normally allow.

Find out more about capillary action on the external site USGS Water Science.

Variables to test

More on variables here

  • Try using epsom salts or sugar instead of table salt. Do you get the same effect?
  • Try cold vs. hot water as a comparison
  • Does it matter which substrate that you form the crystals on?

A man with a glove above a liquid nitrogen vapour cloud

Learn more!

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