Welcome to the Saturday Science Blog Hop! This week the hop is co-hosted by Little Bins for Little Hands, P is for Preschooler and Still Playing School and yours truly!
Continuing our science unit on melting, Caden and I experimented with melting chocolate kisses. This is the second activity of the “What is Melting?” unit in the Science is Simple book by Peggy Ashbrook (affiliate link). This is a slightly modified version of the activity in the book and it was rather challenging to do with a young preschooler while trying to get decent photographs. But I think Caden got the main idea and that is what counts! 🙂
To do this activity you will need chocolate kisses or chocolate chips. I originally thought about using chocolate kisses but chocolate chips work much better. In the end I used chocolate kisses to further demonstrate and drive home the main idea.
Because this experiment was a bit of a flop for us, I am going to tell you how it should have happened and then I will share with you how it actually went down. The directions say to give the child(ren) one chocolate chip to hold in their hand and one to eat. Well, Caden ate the first and second and maybe the third chocolate chip I gave him. It took a couple of times for him to listen, understand and follow the directions I was telling him.
Then we ran around the house, jumping up and down trying to get our hands warm enough to melt the chocolate chip. Caden ate his chocolate chip about half way through, so I had to give him another one. Needless to say his chocolate chip didn’t melt very much. My chocolate chip melted great, but it still took 10 minutes of running and jumping around the house to get it to melt. Then I realized I used my right hand to melt the chocolate and I needed that hand to use my camera. So here is a special tip if you want to take pictures of this experiment- don’t use the hand you need to take pictures!
We observed that my chocolate chip completely melted and that Caden’s only melted a little bit.
And then I permitted him to eat his softened chocolate chip.
Since I was a little unsatisfied with the way this experiment went, I brought out the big guns so Caden could hopefully get a better understanding of how heat warms the chocolate causing it to melt. As you can see in the picture below, Caden was not impressed!
Since I was only able to use the hair dryer for a short amount of time, the chocolate kiss didn’t melt enough to have a big impact, but it did melt some and Caden was able to test this out. He touched the chocolate kiss and noticed it stuck to his finger a little bit.
And then he gladly ate the chocolate kiss!
Even though this experiment didn’t work out as I had hoped, Caden did come away learning that heat causes melting. I know this because we went on to play with ice cubes and we talk some more about melting. I’m saving that story for next week! So stayed tuned!
More Melting Experiments
And now it’s time for the Saturday Science Blog Hop!
I-Spy Snowflakes from P is for Preschooler
Static Experiments from Still Playing School
Icy Hearts Science Experiments from Little Bins for Little Hands
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Super cute! What a great idea!
Thank you for sharing the mishaps! I was laughing the whole post! Too cute!
What a great experiment! Whenever we try candy experiments, the same thing happens – there is more eating than science going on! lol! But this sounds like a tasty way to learn more about melting.
I love it — science AND chocolate! What a great combination. 🙂 I’m featuring you this weekend at Share It Saturday!
I have a feeling that most little kids would eat the chocolate, but that is half the fun right?
Thank you for stopping by the Thoughtful Spot Weekly Blog Hop this week. We hope to see you drop by our neck of the woods next week!
I am featuring this in this weeks Weekly Kids Co-Op over on Triple T Mum!