Naked Egg Experiment

So here at our home school.. we love to get messy and do experiments that make mom's blood pressure shoot up! My parents came to visit us in Panama last week and brought this very cool science experiment book for my kiddos. My 11 year old son picked it up right away and started his plan of attack! (insert stressed out sigh here)

The first experiment he wanted to do was a simple one called "The Naked Egg." Sounds interesting, right?

What I love about this book is that it gives you all the ingredients, steps, a science question, a "Why it Worked" section, and even some ways to vary the results and keep learning!

So, here is what you do!

Ingredients: a raw egg, a glass container, white vinegar

Procedure: Place the egg in a glass container, fill with vinegar. Watch the egg for about 15 minutes and bubbles will begin to form around the surface. Check again in 8 hours, then again in 3 days.

Basically, the egg shell is made of calcium carbonate, which is base. The vinegar is acid, and breaks down the calcium in the shell, releasing carbon dioxide (the bubbles). It will eat away the shell layer by layer (see the brown of the shell residue floating in the pic below).

After 3 or 4 days, the shell is gone and it's just the membrane covering the egg.

Do you like my congealed bacon grease in the back ground? Yum yum!

It's kind of hard to see, but that is the inner membrane of the egg. Our eggs are fresh from our chickens and that membrane tends to be VERY thick. It will probably be thinner on store bought eggs.

You can continue the learning and really make your kids think by doing this extra step:

If water hydrates our bodies.. what does sugar do? Get two separate cups and put a naked egg in each one. Cover one egg with water, and the other egg with corn syrup (the main ingredient in many sodas). After a couple of hours, you can see how the sugars in the corn syrup dehydrated (pulled the water out of) the other egg!! (see the photo of the open book above!) The membrane will have shriveled up a bit and the egg will be smaller! Just imagine what all that yummy soda does to our bodies!!?!

Hope you enjoyed this post, and let me know if you decide to try it! All info from this post was taken from the book pictured, page 162 and 163!

-Karyn