We love doing science projects but sometimes when they are time-based we tend to forget about them.
That’s what happened when we started our egg geodes! We had mixed boiled water with salt, epsom, and borax – each separately and added a bit of food colouring to them to tell the difference (for fun) and labeled them with tape.
For the first few days the boys were peeking to see what was happening with the eggs. The salt and borax mixtures showed changes during this time. By the second week I think the water had for the most part evaporated. But the epsom salt had us wondering if anything would happen as it stayed as a liquid with no crystals to speak of. At that point the boys started to grow less interested and eventually I forgot about them too! This was done in mid-April.
It was worth the wait to see the results! Okay, it really didn’t take this long but it took me this long to finally get around to posting the results! But it was probably a month before the water in the epsom salt fully evaporated.
The salt crystals reminded us of the salt deposits in caves and the crystals were cubic in shape. These eggs were also the only ones that formed deposits at the top edge of the egg.
The borax crystals were much smaller which made it more difficult to see their shape but are apparently they are prismatic – and very sparkly!
We all agreed that the epsom egg geodes were the coolest and worth the wait! The crystals were long and kind of spiky in shape. There were a huge pile of them in the bottom of the egg!
Here is a neat site if you want to try to grow your own crystals and really, who wouldn’t because they are just so neat! 😉
This link is for growing your own egg geodes. It’s a little more in-depth than the one we used. We got ours from the Tinkerlab book but it’s also on their website. The book is very cool, though!
So neat! We did epson salt ones, which turned out great, but having the two minerals to compare is a great idea. Might need to start a new batch here!
Yes! It was very neat to see the way the crystals differed in evaporation time and shape.