Easter Leftovers

I don’t know about you, but I have a ton of leftovers, and i’m not talking about ham, mostly, I mean jelly beans. Thank goodness I love them, but that usually means I end up eating the entire bag by myself. My solution to this is to take them to school.  My kiddos did a lot of jellybean math last week – patterning, counting, tallying, graphing, but there’s always room for a candy experiment. So that’s exactly what we did.

I started by filling clear cups with a number of different liquids – I used what I had in my supply closet, so we ended up with 1 cup of water, 1 cup of vinegar, 1 cup of vegetable oil, 1 cup of a slat and water solution, and 1 cup of a borax and water solution.  I also filled a cup with jellybeans. I let the cups sit on the table until my kiddos finally started asking about them. This is one of my favorite ways to get them hooked on a project, I make it their idea. 

We put one jellybean in each cup and waited to see what would happen. Some of the solutions reacted instantly – for instance, we put a yellow jellybean in the cup of water and the water immediately started turning yellow.  Other reactions took a little longer. I love experiments like this because I can leave them out all day, and the children can return to observe whenever they feel like it. When one student notices something, the entire group re-converges on the experiment to see what has happened. 

There were no earth shattering results to this particular experiment – nothing bubbled, fizzed, or exploded, but we were still able to make observations. Most solutions removed the color from the jellybean completely, leaving a white jellybean sitting at the bottom of the cup. Many of the cups also had the coating of the jellybean (whatever it is that makes them shiny) floating at the top of the cup.  The jellybean in the vegetable did absolutely nothing, which was interesting in itself.  I should note that I used the Starburst jellybeans, so I can’t say for sure that other brands would have the same results. 

This is a great activity to show that changes can occur over a long period of time. I would’ve loved to leave them in the solutions all week to see what happened, but I just don’t have a place to keep them. If you try it please share your results!