Borax Crystal Snowflake

What you need:

• Boiling water

• Borax

• 1 pipe cleaner

• String

• Beaker or Mason Jar

• Pencil

• Scissors

• 1 tablespoon

What you do:

1. Take the pipe cleaner and cut it into three equal sections.

2. Twist together the three sections so that the pipe cleaner creates a six-sided snowflake.

3. Tie the snowflake with string to the pencil.

4. Place the pencil and the hanging snowflake over your beaker or mason jar. Make sure when the snowflake hangs, it doesn't touch the bottom.

5. Take your snowflake out of the jar and fill the jar almost to the top with boiling water.

6. Start adding 1 tablespoon of Borax to the boiling water, stirring to dissolve after each addition, at a time.

   Tip: You want to use 3 tablespoons of Borax per cup of water.

7. Hang the pipe cleaner snowflake into the jar so that the pencil rests on top of the jar and the snowflake is completely covered with liquid.

8. Let the snowflake sit overnight and then remove it to see what happened!

Questions to ask:

1. How did the solution in the jar change overnight?

2. Where did the most crystals form? What happened to the rest of the precipitated crystals?

What's the science:

Hot water can dissolve more Borax than cold water, creating a saturated or supersaturated solution. Heating the water gives the water molecules more energy, allowing them to move farther apart and make more room for the dissolved Borax molecules to spread out. When the water cools, there is not enough room for all of the dissolved Borax anymore so the excess Borax molecules precipitate out and arrange themselves into a solid crystal structure on the surface of the pipe cleaner.