Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Learning in the Kitchen

As I've mentioned it is science fair time. For the next couple of days we tackle the kindergartener's project. She'll be finding out what yeast eats.

Today we read a little bit about how bread is made, talked about the ingredients and observed that there were lots of tiny little holes in bread. Then we took half a cup of very warm water and mixed in a teaspoon of sugar. On the top we sprinkled 2 teaspoons of yeast. After about 3 minutes we took a spoon and played with the bubbles on top. Wow! There were tons of them. I explained a little bit about fermentation to Sadie (although I didn't use that word at first). The yeast "eats" the sugar and makes a gas called carbon dioxide. She took a sniff and then a little taste. I explained to her that the bad taste was the other thing the yeast makes when it eats the sugar, alcohol. We came up with a few things to test to see what else yeast eats - flour, salt, honey, apples and potatoes.

I'll show you how we measure the carbon dioxide tomorrow. In the meantime, take a look at the story of yeast and other experiments you can do.
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