FRIDAY

SCHOOL


Sewanee Elementary helps students beat the "Winter Blahs" by having volunteers from the community come in and teach special "mini-courses" in fun topics. This spring Student Affiliate members Eva Frazier and Sarah Fried, as well as work-study student Becky Price and environmental chemistry major Emily Luethke, helped Lab Coordinator Jennifer Bachman teach a course called "The Chemistry of Colors" to two eager groups: 1st-3rd graders then 4th-5th graders.  This year's program focused on chromatography, first with water-soluble inks, the next with cake icing color pastes, then with alcohol-soluble inks.  The students also got to talk about UV rays and expose UV-detecting beads to sunlight and also make art projects with UV-sensitive paper. During the last Friday's presentation, students made their own radial chromatography t-shirts using Sharpie(R) markers and isopropyl alcohol.

Here is an example of our setup for water chromatography of ink.  We used wicks made of filter paper and then large filter paper circles, but one could also use coffee filters.

Can one do chromatography of food dyes without eating something highly colored?  Well, sure, but who would want to? In this case, we dyed cupcake icing and ate it, on a cupcake of course!

This is a picture of our icing dye chromatography papers.  We chromatographed violet, leaf green, peach, olive green, orange, chocolate brown, and sky blue icing dyes.

How dark can one make icing?  VERY!

This is Eva and Sarah's Happy Cupcake.

2nd grader Carly Grace Pate works hard at getting her design to look just right!

More hardworking, happy students!

                       

Sarah helps Harrison with his Pasteur pipet.

Harrison smiles for the camera!

Here are the happy 3rd and 4th graders with their shirts!


                        
            Jack                                  Nick                                      Dallas                        Justin