This was a quick and fun experiment, with speedy results… which is what you want with a 3 year old boy whose name begins with M. Although I’ve seen this experiment around, I actually decided to do it after seeing it in Play and Find Out About Science, by Janice VanCleave.
We found a handful of old, darkened pennies:
(Eek! Don’t look at my stained bowls throughout this post, please!)
M mixed 1/4 tsp of salt into 1/2 cup of white vinegar:
Then we placed the dirtiest of the dirty pennies in the solution. M spilled vinegar in the process and by the time I had it cleaned up and was ready to snap a photo of the bowl, they looked like this:
It was about 2 minutes and they were already getting super-shiny! We did this part over and over with all our pennies, and talked about how copper is a metal and oxidizes when it’s out in the air. So now my 3 year old is walking around saying “oxidized”. :) He has future nerd written all over him.
Later we found a shiny paperclip and more dirty pennies. We mixed up another salt and vinegar solution and placed the paperclip and pennies in it together:
Then we waited. A couple of hours later we checked and here’s what our silver paperclip looked like: 
The metal on the paperclip attracted the copper particles that the pennies shed in the vinegar.
I’m not sure M took a whole lot of knowledge away from this experiment, but he really enjoyed it and had fun!
For more fun science experiments, check out Ticia’s Science Sunday post here!
Have a beautiful day! :)
You can read about our other bunny activities and bunny books 
Cotton balls, glue, 2 large green buttons, 2 small pink buttons, pink pipecleaner shaped into bunny mouth, pink pom-pom, pink construction paper with ears drawn as well as 4 to 6 straight lines for whiskers, and scissors (not pictured).
For some reason M thought he was supposed to cut between the black lines instead of along them. So, while I intended to have 6 whiskers, we ended up with 5 and only used 4. I actually liked how they looked with the black line down the center. While he did this I cut out the ears.
