Crystal growth

Crystals are like really fancy Lego blocks that grow when we put them in a special mix of ingredients, called a solution. Imagine building a LEGO tower with blocks that keep sticking to each other until the tower is really tall!

The solution that we put the crystals in has special ingredients that turn into crystals when they stick together. Just like how you make Jello, we dissolve the special ingredients in the solution by heating it up until it all mixes together. Then, we let it cool down a bit and put a little crystal in the solution. This crystal is like a tiny seed that starts to grow when it's in the solution.

The magic is that when the crystal seed is in the solution, the special ingredients start to stick onto the seed, one by one, making it bigger and bigger until it becomes a big beautiful crystal! It just keeps stacking up until it can't get any bigger. And sometimes the crystals can grow in really cool shapes and patterns.

We can control how big the crystal grows by controlling things like how much solution we use, how long we wait, and how often we give it new ingredients to stick together. And after we finish growing our crystals, we can explore their unique properties like their colors, shapes, and how they reflect light.