Have any jelly beans left that haven’t been eaten???
Here’s a great STEM experiment you can do with whatever you have in the kitchen that will teach the scientific method and let your kiddo experience a little bit of chemistry!
The scientific method sounds complicated, but I promise it’s not! I’ll walk you through it!
You can use my Experiment Page and follow along with our experiment!
We started with a question: what would happen if we put jelly beans in different stuff????
Next we did our “research” and formed our “hypothesis” aka our educated guess 😄
We gathered our different liquids to test and decided we thought the jelly bean would break down the most in the vinegar because it was the stinkiest 😂
Our experiment started with six cups filled with our test liquids and labeled – very important to properly label in experiments!
We made sure all the cups have the same amount, because a great experiment only changes one thing at a time!
This little chemist used his fine motor skills to stir in the sugar and salt…
…and add one jelly bean of the same color (so again only one thing is different!) to each cup.
Then we waited and observed!
And it didn’t take long!
Within seconds the color was already coming off.
We checked the jelly beans every 15 minutes and recorded our “data,” aka what we saw happening, and by the end of an hour we had our results!
We were completely wrong hahahahaha
The water cup which I included as a control ended up dissolving the jelly bean the most!
All the other liquids ended up preserving it – especially the sugar.
We reasoned since a jelly bean is made of sugar, sugar water already had enough sugar in it and therefore didn’t dissolve the jelly bean. 😁
Now that we knew which liquid dissolved the best, we tried all the colors to see if any one color dissolved faster.
After 15 minutes it looked like pink and purple were losing the least amount of color (and purple had the most of the weird layer of white deposit covering it?)…
…but after 30 minutes it was yellow and orange that still had the most color on the jelly bean meaning red, pink, green and purple were the winners!
Our conclusion: Water is the best at dissolving jelly beans with the colors orange and yellow being the slowest to dissolve!
See? Scientific method, in the simplest form, just means asking a question, making a good guess based on what you can learn, then testing it out and seeing what happens!
Hooray science!
Really your kiddos are doing this all the time as they learn about the world around them, but helping them think about it in a science-y, step by step way will get them in the right mindset for STEM development and learning!
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