The Amazing Naked Egg

Hey look, I'm actually blogging about something in the same week that we did it!  I've been dying to do this experiment that I found on Pinterest for a while. We really had fun with it and spent 5 days doing it!

We started by putting the egg in a cup and filling it with vinegar.  The kids made hypothesis of what they thought would happen.  Lincoln thought the egg would get rotten.  Savannah said she had read about this experiment in a book and that the egg shell would disappear. Sometimes having a smart kid is not so fun.  She has been able to guess the correct hypothesis on almost every experiment that we have done.

After about 24 hours of sitting the egg was mostly naked, but there was one spot that still had a bit of shell on it, so I moved the egg to a new cup and refilled it with clean vinegar.  I'm not sure if that was necessary or not, but the old one had a pretty good layer of white foam on the top from the shell, so I figured it couldn't hurt.

We let that sit for about another 12 hours, and we had a perfect rubbery naked egg.  We discussed that the vinegar is an acid and that it had eaten away at the calcium carbonate in the shell (similar to our bones!) and that's why it disappeared. The egg had also gotten a bit bigger, so we talked about what osmosis is.  Again, Savannah was able to deduct that the vinegar had gotten into the membrane of the egg, so there must be tiny holes in it that we can't see.  She really does amaze me!  This is what the naked egg looked like next to a regular egg the same size as this one started out.

I asked the kids if they wanted to try anything else with it, and without even being given possibilities, Lincoln wanted to see if we could make it even bigger.  We decided that in addition to that, we wanted to see if we could make it change colors too.  Kinda killing to birds with one stone, so to speak.  So we mixed up some blue water and put the egg in. 

I'm not entirely convinced that the egg got any bigger, but it did turn blue.  Much deeper blue than I had anticipated. 

Next, we decided to see if we could shrink the egg, so we put it in a cup and filled it with Karo syrup. 

I loved that with the blue coloring in the egg, you could totally see the separation of the water that came out of the egg and the Karo syrup. 

The egg totally SHRUNK!

Lincoln thought the half-full membrane sack was the coolest thing ever!

Savannah wanted to see if we could make the egg big again, so we put it back in the water.  We decided to use colored water again since it turned out so cool before.  This is what the egg looked like when we first put it in the water.

This is what it looked like 3 hours later!  I lifted it up to check on it, and it was too swollen to fit back to the bottom!

And the final product.

We were going to take it outside and try bouncing it on a cookie sheet starting from about an inch high and going higher and higher to see when it would break.  But, Lincoln accidentally knocked it off the counter and it exploded all over my kitchen.  I didn't take a picture, but I wish I had because the mess was bright green!  It was a perfect combination of the blue and yellow from the different experiments. 

This was by far the favorite science experiment that we have done.  It was so much fun, and easy too.