Hot. Sticky. Sweet. From my head. To my feet.

Seriously...my shoes were sticky and my hair had coke in it. And now I have that song stuck in my head.

The first unit of science, regardless of the grade level is about safety and processes, and the scientifizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz........

Sorry. I fell asleep just thinking about it.

It's so boring. So boring that even I hate myself after teaching about it. So I have to do something to keep myself awake, much less the fourth graders. So I work with them going through the scientific process. With really cool stuff. Stuff that "explodes".

Yes, it's the time of year in which I toss a bunch of mentos into a 2 liter of coke and run to get out of the way. Except yesterday, it all went horribly wrong. I found this cool thing at Hobby Lobby that has a pin to keep the mentos out until you're ready. See the exhibit below:



The problem was when I pulled the pin out, it knocked over the coke, and pointed it at the children, and I am NOT going to deal with those emails, so I had to throw myself in front of it and fight the explosion of syruppy goodness to get the bottle upright. It actually led to a really cool picture:



Today, we redid the experiment (because who can resist a second day of mentos-y, coke-y fun) with four different types of sodas. And today, instead of using the expensively useless tube of plastic, I used a test tube and an errant Uno card, and got results that were way better. (Yes, "Way better" is the correct scientific term!)

I give the kids the cameras, because the alternative is to give them coke and mentos, and as I said, I'm not going to deal with those emails. They caught me in a rare moment in which I have no idea what I could have been doing other than saying "It's a bird...it's a plane..."


And they of course came through with the phenomenal pictures. The kids actually got some even better than this, but they all had the kids in them, and I am SO NOT going to deal with those emails!



Yeah, science is totally cool.