Hawley Parent Provides Science Experience For Students

Hawley parents Mike Brennan and Laura Brennan visited the school’s science room on Friday, January 14, to share a science experiment with kindergarteners in their son Kevin’s class.

While Mrs Brennan came armed with a camera to document the event, Mr Brennan, who works for Unilever, brought water, vegetable oil, black beans, coffee beans, and soap.

Both Mr Brennan and Mrs Brennan are Newtown natives, and the Brennans have visited Hawley Elementary School before, when Kevin was in preschool, to share another science experience with the students.

When students poured the water and vegetable oil together in a cup, Mr Brennan explained the students were watching two substances that would not mix because of polarity.

Mr Brennan then posed a question to the students, and he wanted them to come up with their own hypothesis. Would either a black bean or a coffee bean float or sink in the mixture? Students dropped both a coffee bean and a black bean into the mixture and watched as the coffee bean floated at the top and the black bean sank to the bottom.

When soap was poured into the mixture, Mr Brennan observed, nothing magical happened, until he instructed the students to mix the liquids together with a straw. When mixed, he said, the students were observing emulsification. The soap, he said, brings together the oil and the water.