Brush Your Teeth! An Experiment

In co-op, this year, the kids are studying the human body and some health thrown in for good measure. We just finished our unit on teeth and I ended the learning with a little experiment. This experiment was to illustrate why you need to brush your teeth or what sugar left unbrushed will do to your teeth after a long time. Now, as you may remember from your own health classes, the teeth are covered with enamel. It's that great stuff that protects your inner teeth. When you leave food on your teeth, the sugar in the foods mixes with the plaque in your mouth to create acid. Said acid then slowly eats away at your teeth. So, to prevent this acid, always brush after eating and don't eat sugary foods between meals. The saliva produced during the chewing process helps combat much of that acid. However, less saliva is produced with just a small treat. So, without further ado, our experiment.

The ingredients: White vinegar, 2 uncooked eggs (one for each kid), 2 containers with lids. We put the egg into the container and covered the egg with white vinegar.

Almost immediately, the acid in the white vinegar began to attack the "enamel" or shell

We got home about 45 minutes later and the shell was even more encrusted with bubbles and we could see bits beginning to float away.

One week later-we now have our egg out of it's vinegar bath. The egg on the left has lost it's shell completely and appears to have swollen (bonus experiments coming up). Here the girls compare our vinegar egg to another control egg.

Up close and personal. Our egg has nothing holding it together except the membrane inside.

Ruth found this out when she said, "Isaiah said it was like a rubber ball!" poke, poke, pop! Here's Ruth's egg, looking very eggy in the vinegar. The funniest part? These eggs, after 1 week in our window did not smell at all. Unless you count the overwhelming smell of vinegar.

The moral of this story? BRUSH YOUR TEETH OR THEY'LL ROT OFF! Thus ends, my public service announcement.