Fall Unit

1. Parts of a Leaf

2. Leaf painting

3. Salt Crystal Leaves

4. Fall Scavenger Hunt

5. Five Fall Leaves

6. Broccoli Stamp Tree

7. Season Song

8. Fall color sheet

Salt Crystal Leaves

This is what you will need:

• Pipe cleaners • Mason jars • Salt • Plastic forks • Fabric leaves

How to Set Up the Salt Crystal Leaves Science

Experimen

Fill your jars with water (we put 2 leaves in each jar) and fill a saucepan with that water. Boil the water on high heat.

While the water is boiling, poke a hole in the center of each leaf and thread a pipe cleaner through to make a long leaf stem.

Suspend the leaves from a plastic fork placed over the mouth of the jar.

Once the water boils, add enough salt to create a sheet of salt crystals across the surface of the water. Turn off the heat.

Pour the water into the jars, covering the leaves.

Salt crystals form when a solution of water becomes over-saturated with salt.

This mixture is known as a super-saturated solution, and it occurs when there is too much salt in the water to bond fully with the water molecules.

You can tell that you’ve made a supersaturated solution when the salt will no longer dissolve into the boiling water.

The temperature of the water also allows more of the salt to bond with the water, which means that the solution becomes even more supersaturated.

As the water evaporates, the salt crystals cling to one another, forming large squares of salt, just like are found in nature.

Kids will be fascinated by the ionic bonds that salt makes, creating perfect squares and rectangles every time.

We like to examine our results with a magnifying glass.

On the leaves, the salt crsyatls look like frost or dew in the crisp fall air!

Wait three days to one week for the crystals to form.

Remove the crystals from the water and dry on a paper towel.