Experiments at Home Guidance

Even if you are home schooling, you can still develop very good experimental skills if you are resourceful and creative. And if you can afford a few % of what you are already spending on your education to buy some equipment, you will be able to do a whole lot more. Doing your own experiments may be less accurate, but that will actually be very good for developing your skills in analysing and reducing uncertainties! But first, read up thoroughly on good procedures, and ALWAYS MAKE A CAREFUL RISK ASSESSMENT! 

Safety First 

Although you are not working in a lab, you should consider how to work safely in a lab environment, here is a video to help focus on safety. 

WATCH – Lab Safety (CAIE) Links to an external site.

Always make a careful risk assessment. Write it down fully and get someone else to review it. This is also a very useful exercise for your studies! For anything more risky than normal desk study, never work alone! Always make sure someone else is with you and is aware of what you are doing. This is normal workplace practice which you should be learning to adopt as standard anyway.

Basic Equipment List 

If you can get hold of a few fairly low cost items, available from many online or town-centre hardware stores, you can do a lot with them. You may already have some of these around you: 

  • aluminium foil
  • balances to measure up to 500 g, with precision of at least 0.1 g 
  • beakers or cups made of an insulating material such as polystyrene, approximate capacity 150 cm3
  • beakers, squat form with lip, 1 dm3, 250 cm3 and 100 cm3
  • boiling tubes, approximately 150 mm × 25 mm
  • Bunsen burners
  • burettes, 50 cm3 (ISO385 or grade B)
  • conical flasks, within the range 50 cm3 to 250 cm3
  • delivery tubes
  • filter funnels and filter papers
  • flame test wires or alternative apparatus
  • measuring cylinders, 100 cm3, 50 cm3, 25 cm3, 10 cm3 (ISO6706 or ISO4788 or grade B)
  • pens for labelling glassware
  • pipette fillers
  • racks for test-tubes and boiling tubes
  • red and blue litmus paper
  • retort stands, bosses and clamps
  • small droppers or teat pipettes
  • small funnels for filling burettes
  • spatulas
  • stirring rods
  • stirring thermometers, –10 °C to + 110 °C, with 1 °C graduations
  • stoppers for test-tubes and boiling tubes
  • stopwatches to measure to an accuracy of 1 s
  • test-tube holders (to hold test-tubes or boiling tubes)
  • test-tubes (Pyrex or hard glass), approximately 125 mm × 16 mm
  • tripods
  • universal indicator paper
  • volumetric pipettes, 25 cm3 (ISO648 or grade B)
  • wash bottles
  • white tiles

Experiments To do At Home  

Here is some guidance on a few experiments that you could try at home. 

EXPLORE – Chromatography Experiment (Children’s Museum) Links to an external site.

EXPLORE – How to Electrolyse Water (wikiHow) Links to an external site.

EXPLORE – Investigating Exo and Endothermic Reactions (CAIE) Links to an external site.

Online Experimental Simulations 

Here are 15 experiments – which are virtual experiments that you can work through.  

EXPLORE – Virtual Experiments (CAIE) Links to an external site.