Science Fair

I love science fairs. I love researching and writing essays and I love making the posters, and I love checking out what other people did. When Madie brought the announcement home from school that lower grades were invited to participate in an un-judged science fair, I was wicked excited! I tried explaining what it was to Madie but she didn't really get it. Finally I said, "How about we try an experiment with food coloring?" Her face lit up. Anything to get to squeeze those little teardrops of color!

So we came up with a hypothesis, which, thanks to "Dinosaur Train," is a concept my kids have a rudimentary understanding of. Our question was: Can you dye frosting with real food or only petroleum-based dyes? (Don't worry--we discusses "petroleum-based" many times throughout this project.) My hypothesis was that we could and get a similar outcome. Madie's was that we couldn't--she wasn't sold on the idea that we could turn the frosting a color, and was even more worried the frosting would taste or smell like the food we put into it.

I'll give you the highlights: We dehydrated beets and spinach and crushed them into as fine a powder we could manage. We used turmeric from the store--already powdered. And we used mashed blueberries, sent through a sieve to remove skins. (These were her suggestions after talking about what foods were what colors.) These were our results:

I know--vertical. It's annoying. 

Madie was amazed. Really and truly. She kept saying, "It's turning yellow! I can't believe it!" That was the first one we did and she had the same reaction with every single one after that. Then she tasted them all and said, "It doesn't even taste like spinach! It just tastes like regular frosting!" Her other observations were that the green and pink were speckled (we couldn't get the spinach and beet powders fine enough I guess--but I thought it was pretty); the first blueberry batch didn't really turn a color, so we added a little baking soda to the next batch and it did turn a very light, kind of grayish blue. Both of them separated because of the moisture.

Of course, she also had a lot of fun putting the board together. We talked about everything we did, then I typed it all up and she helped me glue things on and come up with a title. She was in charge of manning the post. (Easy, since we had graham crackers and frosting to taste--she had no problem hanging out.) I am so glad we did it together this year--I think she really had fun and will look forward to it in future years when it's a requirement.

"Madie, please come out and let me get a picture of you with the board."

"Thank you."

"Point to your favorite thing we did. There! Great!"

"Whoa, Madie. That's--that's great. I think we're done."