Last night 6 mystery eggs appeared in our classroom. They were absolutely beautiful. Today we explored and investigated them. At first the eggs were smooth, cold and rock hard. Inside each of the eggs was something interesting. Some children thought it looked spiky like a hedgehog or Christmas tree or even as if an ice egg had formed around a sea urchin. We could see icicles too. After looking at them through magnifying glasses, we added some salt to see what would happen. We have seen Mr Gilchrist putting salt on the icy playground and so the children thought that the salt would make the ice eggs melt. The children described what they saw: they saw cracks appearing on the surface, it became lumpy and bumpy with holes in it. Instead of being smooth, the egg was sharp and rough with cracks like lightning and drips began to come off the egg as it began to melt. The centre of the egg changed too, with it looking less spiky than before. The last thing that we did was to add food colouring to the ice egg. Some mysterious colours appeared. Even if we added green food colouring, some pink appeared. When we shone a torch on the egg we could see that it was clearer inside, and on some eggs the food colouring had soaked through the cracks to the middle, while some had stayed on the surface and rolled off into the container. We have put each of the eggs in a different place (cupboard, windowsill, freezer, radiator, outside and classroom) to see what will happen next. What an exciting day we had in P3!
