How Many Drops Will Fit?

We love kids’ science activities so I was thrilled to get my hands on a copy of Asia Citro’s new book, The Curious Kid’s Science Book. Packed with more than 100 hands-on activities for little scientists, it was hard to pick just one to try out first. After much back and forth, we finally landed on a simple and intriguing project exploring how many water drops would fit on the head of a penny. The boys decided to take the project one step further and test how many drops would fit on a nickel, dime and quarter too!

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Getting Ready

To prep, we gathered a few simple supplies:

A cup of water
A penny, nickel, dime and quarter
A pipette
The Curious Kid’s Science Book
A printout of our record sheet (below)
A pencil

How Many Drops Will Fit?

My boys love predicting almost anything – how long it will take us to get home, how many pieces of mail we’ll find in the mailbox…. anything. So they were eager to guess how many drops of water would fit on each coin too. They grabbed their record sheet (below) and wrote down their hypotheses so they could check them later.

When they were ready, each boy picked up a pipette and squeezed the bulb at the top to suck water up the tube. (I colored our water blue so that you could easily see it in action.)

Then they moved the pipette over the penny so that it was hovering about half an inch above it and very gently squeezed out a drop of water. “One,” they counted.

One drop after the next, their puddle of water slowly grew on top of the penny. The boys were careful to work slowly so that they could easily keep track of the drops. “Ten, eleven, twelve…”

Then finally, POP! The domed bubble spilled over the edge of the coin onto the table. With an excited giggle, the mini scientists recorded their results.