Cleaning a Penny Experiment
We were recently counting our money, when Logi-Bear tried to eat one of the pennies. My main reason to not let him? Because money is dirty. Which naturally led to a discussion about cleaning the money, and started our next experiment!
What is the best way to clean a penny?
We looked up methods of cleaning pennies, and choose 4 relatively easy ones that we had all the materials for.
We gathered all of the materials we needed first…
We started off with the eraser trick. Simple use an eraser and erase the penny!
This actually worked okay, but it was time consuming. And it wasn’t very easy either. We took turns and got the penny looking okay.
Our 2nd method was ketchup and baking soda. First, using a toothbrush we scrubbed the penny with ketchup.
We rinsed the ketchup off and then used our fingers to scrub with a baking soda/water paste.
Third we tried a vinegar and salt mixture. Just add a penny to a mixture of vinegar and salt, stir, and let sit for a few minutes.
After removing the penny from the mixture we scrubbed it with a baking soda/water paste.
This one got fizzy pretty quickly!
In the end, the ketchup and baking soda worked the best! It wasn’t difficult at all, and produced a pretty clean penny. The eraser was the simplest, but it was too tedious. The lemon and salt was neat because of the bubbling reaction, but it turned the penny a strange color. And lastly the vinegar and baking soda worked okay, it just didn’t work as well as the ketchup and baking soda.
The boys loved seeing how clean we could get the pennies and which method would work best. We found out that once pennies get that black on them, they’re nearly impossible to clean, so when cleaning your pennies choose ones that aren’t blackened.
What a fun and easy idea!!! Will try this with my kids very soon!
This is such a cool experiment! I would have never guessed ketchup & baking soda would have produced the shiniest penny! I will definitely try this experiment with my little munchkin when he is older. Thanks for sharing 🙂