Fire Science for Kids

We have been talking about campfires all week as part of our indoor camping theme. One of the opportunities this theme has given me is the chance to discuss fire safety with my 3 year old before we go camping next week – eek! I’m super excited to go camping in my favorite place on earth, the coast of California, but not quite sure how it will be containing a very active 11 month old and a 3 year old. This is why we have been ‘practicing’ all week…in a very fun way of course!

So today we decided to explore fire a little bit and see how it reacted to different chemicals and elements.

I started by putting 4 candles on a baking sheet (next to the sink) and labeling the tray with what our different elements were going to be. Mack and I like to pretend that we are real scientists when doing our projects, we like to talk about predictions and observations and label everything (for whatever reason that makes it seem real!).

I chose oxygen, wind, salt and water as our variables.

1) Oxygen:

I told Mack that fire needs oxygen to breathe just like we do. He predicted that if we took the oxygen away the fire wouldn’t be able to breathe! Smart boy 🙂 We covered our flame up with a little bowl and watched the flame slowly wither away before extinguishing completely.

2) Wind:

So Mack knows that if you blow on a candle if will go out; therefore his prediction was just that – that wind puts fire out. I wanted to show him that just a little bit of wind can do quite the opposite. We blew very softly at first and watched the flame dance around and get bigger. He enjoyed testing just how much wind our little candle could take. We re-lit the candle and practiced this one a few times. I forgot to preface this post by saying that Mack really loves fire…should I be admitting that?? So this was right up his alley…

3) Salt:

I had read online that different salts can effect the color of fire; we tried both table salt and rock salt..and didn’t see much of an effect. I guess this counts as a finding?? At least Mack enjoyed pouring the salt on the flame…and we found that enough salt will put a flame out.

4) Water:

I gave Mack a spray bottle with water and let him spray the flame. This was another of his favorites, experimenting with different sprays and streams to see how to best put the fire out. He was able ti spray the flame directly with a nice stream of water a couple of times and put it right out. A big victory in a 3 year-old’s book!

I also decided to demonstrate to Mack what hand sanitizer (alcohol) would do to the fire. We both loved watching the fire get nice and big and then watching it die back down to a regular flame.

And lastly, we decided to see if we could roast marshmallows over a candle! They kept catching on fire and we got to re-test our ‘wind’ variable 🙂

Fun science!!

Check out how we set up our indoor campsite too.

This was also a good opportunity for me to teach Mack about “Stop, Drop and Roll”. We practiced it a few times and then listened to the Veggie Tales song about it!

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