We were talking about ear wax, and he asked “what is wax?” I gave him examples like candles and beeswax, but he hasn’t really observed enough of those things for the examples to help.
In: Engineering
Wax is if fuel was a clay.
I’m sure he’s played with play-dough or whatnot before. So imagine it’s that, except it can also burn like wood.
It’s wood-clay! Kinda!
Really thick/solid oil.
When you heat it up it turns back into oil.
Could use the analogy of butter if it helps.
Different things are solid, liquid, or gas, at different temperatures.
Look at water and ice and steam. Look at how butter softens before it melts and hardens in the fridge. Look at rock and lava.
Wax will turn to liquid when heated, and become more solid when cooled.
Wax is a kind of oil, like petrol or grease or tar or skin oil. Some kinds of wax are produced by animals and plants, like ear wax or bees wax or waxy plant leaves. Natural waxes help protect things against stuff like bacteria or stop things drying out.
Mythbusters did an episode making ear wax candles. Your child will love that stuff. Show him the entire series.
It’s a type of substance, like how “clay”, “liquid”, “stone”, “wood”, etc. are substances.
All substances have qualities, like wood and stone are hard. Liquid moves really easily and takes the shape of its container. Clay doesn’t move as easily as liquid but it can still pretty easily change shape. Wood can burn, while stone cannot. You can cut wood with a saw. You need a very special saw to cut stone. You can cut clay with lots of things. You can’t cut liquid because anything saw-like would just pass through it.
Wax usually feels kinda soft to the touch – softer than stone, at least. It gets softer when you heat it up, and if it gets hot enough it’ll turn into a liquid. (Don’t touch it when it’s liquid! It’ll burn you!) As it gets warmer, it becomes shapeable like clay. When it’s cool, it will feel harder and keep its shape. It can also burn like wood, which is why it’s used to make candles.
Inside their hive, bees make containers out of wax and use it to store honey or eggs. We make candles out of wax. You can use thin amounts of wax to seal up things or make things shiny.
Our ears use wax to trap stuff like dirt and dust and push it out of the ear. Our earwax is very soft and a bit sticky, so it’s good at trapping things like that. Our body keeps making more and more earwax so it’ll slowly push the older wax out of the ear, along with everything it trapped. You don’t usually notice this happening because it’s so slow. You don’t usually need to take the wax out of your ear yourself – it’ll come out on its own when it’s ready.
We do not use our earwax for any jobs like candles or sealing jars. We use other types of wax for that.
Wax is really interesting! It’s made of all the same things that oil and plastic are made of, and the way it behaves is somewhere in between them. Oil, wax, and plastic are all made up of molecules that are kind of like chains. The links are all the same, but the longer the chains are, the more likely they are to tangle up. That tangling is what holds plastic and wax together when they’re cool, and when you heat them up, that loosens the tangles and lets the molecules move around (softening and melting!). You can demonstrate this with Legos or other building toys. Oil is like if you have a pile of loose bricks. It doesn’t take much effort to pour them, push your hand through, etc. Plastic is more like having all the bricks stuck together. It takes a lot of force to change the shape of the single interconnected block. Wax is like sticking together small clumps of Legos, then loosely piling the clumps up. It has more structure than the pile of loose bricks, but not as much as the single block.
At that age, the best answer is to get the 4 year old some wax to play with. You can buy dental wax at a drug store for around $3. It breaks off in little beads that they can roll in their fingers and get a feel for what wax is.
Play is actually a very effective method of learning. Think of it as a series of chaotic experiements. What happens if I squish it? How does it taste? Does it stick to the table? What happens if I roll it?
All of those things will teach you something about the physical properties of wax, all of which add up together to answer “what is wax”?
Latest Answers