Homeschool Curriculum – Shiny Silver

No matter what homeschool curriculum you are following, one thing’s for sure: if there’s silver, it will need polishing. So why not combine a cool science project with a chore to create a fun homeschool curriculum project for a chemistry class? Not only will you be multi-tasking (great for efficiency), but you’ll also be learning some very useful information about household products.

In order to get started with this experiment, you’ll need a few things:
    •    One tarnished piece of silver, such as a spoon or a piece of plated silver jewelry
    •    One pan into which you can submerse the silver
    •    Aluminum foil
    •    Water that will fill the pan
    •    A pan to heat the water in
    •    Kitchen mitts
    •    Baking soda (you’ll need about one cup of baking soda for every gallon of water that you use)

Once you have these materials together, you’re ready to get started! Here’s what to do next:
    •    Line the pan with the aluminum foil.
    •    Place the silver on top of the foil (the silver should touch the foil).
    •    Boil the water. Once boiling, remove the pan from heat and place in a sink.
    •    Add one cup of baking soda to the water. Don’t worry if the mixture forms a froth or spills over the rim of the pot.
    •    Pour the mixture into the pan with the silver. Make sure the mixture covers the silver completely.
    •    Record your observations.

What you observed:
After you poured the hot water over the silver, you probably noticed that the tarnish on the silver soon began to disappear. However, if the silver had a thick layer of tarnish on it, you may need to make the mixture again by heating more water and adding more baking soda. Once the silver sat in the mixture for several minutes, all of the tarnish should have disappeared. That’s a pretty cool homeschool curriculum and way of simplifying chores, right?

This experiment makes polishing silver a breeze! By the way, thousands of homeschool parents use the free Homeschool Science Experiment Guide and workbook for other science experiments – many of which they can also use every day at home.  

Of course, this experiment wouldn’t be complete until you received a scientific explanation for what happened. Before reading on, take some time to write down your own thoughts and ideas about why the tarnish disappeared. Check them against the scientific reason to see how close you are.

A scientific explanation:
Tarnished silver is the result of a chemical reaction between silver and sulfide. The reaction forms silver sulfide, which is black. Darkened silver has a thin layer of silver sulfide on the surface, which causes the silver to become darker, sometimes even black. However, this transformation isn’t permanent and can be reversed simply by removing the sulfide from the surface of the silver.

There are two ways to remove this sulfide. The most common way is to polish the silver, which you may have had to do regularly before you found this experiment. However, polishing silver can not only damage the silver surface, but it can also remove some of the silver itself.

The second way to remove sulfide is to submerse the silver in the liquid solution you created. When you use the second method, you remove the sulfide without damaging or removing any of the silver.

But wait - that’s not all! Remember the aluminum lining you used? That aluminum lining is important. Many metals, including silver and aluminum, interact with sulfur. Aluminum attracts sulfur. Therefore, the sulfur was more attracted to the aluminum than the silver, which helped greatly in the sulfur removal process.

However, these two metals need to be submerged in the baking soda solution in order for the transfer to work effectively. Believe it or not, this homeschool curriculum project actually created an electrical current between the silver and the aluminum called an electrochemical reaction (which is similar to the reaction that occurs in a battery).

Not a bad trick to learn, huh?