Some quick notes and resources for our sixth day's topic, which was our Senses, including additional exploration of The Nervous System (sight, hearing, smell) as well as The Vestibular System (balance).
We began today by looking further at our Eggmosis experiment (from The Urinary System) and observing our naked egg. This membrane-only duck egg (whose shell had been removed due to weekend stay in a jar of vinegar and which had absorbed water through the membrane and swollen greatly after that shell came off) had been placed in corn syrup overnight.
Because Nature always seeks a balance, water from inside the swollen membrane moved out and into the corn syrup, which also contains water but at a much lower concentration. This left the duck egg shrunken inside a too-big membrane. The jar of corn syrup had a layer of duck egg water floating on top of the denser syrup. My student said she could feel the difference between the two layers when she swished her hand around inside the jar!
When we weighed the deflated duck egg, it had a mass of 59 grams.
So... yes! A LOT of water left that egg! More than went into it!!
When she opened up the membrane, we saw that the yolk inside was smaller than a raw duck egg's (we cracked one into another bowl for purposes of comparison). The yolk from the deflated egg was also darker and had a different consistency. She described it as dehydrated, which would make perfect sense if so much water left the duck egg! The raw duck egg yolk was runny. The deflated & dehydrated duck egg yolk was thick and felt like slime (pictured above).
Note: We didn't do this but if your child loves thinking puzzles, The Book of Think: Or How to Solve a Problem Twice Your Size by Marilyn Burns is fun!