Since Thanksgiving is coming up this week, we read...
...The Night Before Thanksgivingby
Natasha Wing.
A very cute story about all the food, family, and fun
that are involved in Thanksgiving,
I thought the kiddos needed to learn some of the
Kitchen Science that goes into cooking up
a big meal.
Using information I found on websites like
THIS and THIS,
we performed the following experiment with...
...yeast.We talked about how yeast is a fungus used
to give bread its "puffiness."
To show the kiddos how yeast works,
we did a little experiment...
Each kiddo got a baggie and put...
...three teaspoons of sugar andone teaspoon of yeast.
The kiddos enjoyed looking at the yeast...
...and touch it.Then they added...
...a half cup of warm water into the baggie.We squeezed out as much air as possible out of the baggie
and sealed it.
(Looks lovely, doesn't it?)We then set the baggies...
...in a windowsill and waited for the yeast to performits magic.
After about 15 minutes, the kiddos observed...
...bubbles in the bag.This is a chemical reaction of the yeast and the sugar,
which results in carbon dioxide bubbles.
We left the bags in the windowsill overnight, and awoke to...
...baggies fully inflated from the carbon dioxide gas!
It's amazing how something so gross lookingcan make something taste SO GOOD...
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For more fun with science,
head on over to
Science Sunday...
Yep, you're not homeschooling until you experiment with bread :)
ReplyDeleteLove the face!
Great idea! We've had this book out from the library this week too. I think I will be adding the cool experiment with it.
ReplyDeleteVery cool expreriment. My father in law loves to bake bread. He and I once attended a class given by Peter Reinhart and he discussed quite a bit of bread science in this class. It's very fascinating really.
ReplyDeleteYeah...... so I left a brand new bag full of frozen rolls on my counter. I was disturbed by a rather loud banging sound from the bag exploding after midnight.....
ReplyDeleteThen it was the fun of watching it slowly expand and make the lid of my trash can rise.
Your experiment sounds like a lot more fun.