Kitchen Science With Fall Leaves
Simple science doesn't just show children things that will happen for sure (like exploding baking soda and vinegar volcanoes), it also teaches them to ask questions, wonder "What will happen if...", and develop an experiment to answer the question. What will happen if you put leaves from your yard in different liquids?
Materials
Before You Play
Talk to your child about how sometimes we don’t know all the answers. ...And that’s great! When we don’t know something, we get the opportunity to ask another person or look up the answer on the computer or create an experiment to help us understand. When we don’t know something, we get to be scientists!
Directions
Look around your kitchen and decide on a few liquids to use in your experiment.
Pour liquids into the glass jars. (We tried water, salt water and water with lime juice. In this step, we poured water into three glass jars, then added salt to one and lime juice to another.)
Add a leaf to each jar, cover with a lid, and label the jars so you remember which liquid is in which jar.
Make predictions! Ask your child what they think will happen to the leaves and write down your predictions.
Set the jars near a window and let them sit for 48 hours.
After two days, it’s time to record your results! What does the water look like in each jar? What about the leaves?
Write down what your child observes and compare it to the predictions. Were any of your guesses correct? (“Our salt water changed color!”) Did anything surprise you? (“We thought the lime juice might make the leaf squishy but it didn’t!”)
Science