Egg in a Bottle

This week, we have been talking all about birds on the farm.  And...since birds on the farm give us eggs, it seemed appropriate to use eggs for our weekly science experiment!

Our task was to get a hard-boiled egg inside a bottle without breaking it.  We had lots of ideas, but it was very hard to come up with an idea that would keep the egg in one piece.  In fact, the only idea that didn't involve breaking the egg in some way was to use a magic wand!  Don't you love the way 4-year-olds think!

First, we peeled a hard-boiled egg to see what was under the shell.

 When we dropped the egg in, it was very obvious that the egg wouldn't fit through the neck of the bottle.

 Now time for the "magic"...we lit a piece of paper on fire and dropped it in the bottle!

 Just as the fire went out, we dropped the egg in.  You can see the egg beginning to slide through the neck of the bottle in this picture!

 There it goes!

Wow!  It worked!  Our egg is actually in the bottle!  Look at those faces!

 Some of us speculated that the egg shrunk from the fire and that was the reason it fell through.  Here, we turn the bottle upside down to show that it is still the same size because it won't come back out of the bottle!

In 4-year-old terms, we learned that the fire made the air inside the bottle hot which made it expand.  When the air cooled, it created a vacuum that sucked the egg down into the bottle.  We also talked about how this would not work if the egg wasn't boiled because it wouldn't be "squishy" like the hard-boiled egg that we felt at the beginning of the lesson.  Although we discussed why this experiment worked, the most important part for our class it to begin thinking about how and why things happen and to use critical thinking to come up with ideas for solutions to problems.  Another big piece of
Pre-K science is being able to observe and describe what we see and one way we do that is by drawing.  So, after the experiment, we took our first shot at drawing what we saw.  I can't wait to share those with you at parent conferences.

Be sure to check out more details of this experiment on the back of next week's newsletter in case you want to try this at home!