When Science is Sweet

There's a first time for everything, especially when you're at a newer school.  Plano Elementary held their first SCIENCE FAIR this year. I IMMEDIATELY knew which of my kids would want to participate.  Yep, you guessed it, Karson.  She did her study on growing rock candy.  Isaac did his study on, well never mind, he didn't participate =).  It's hard enough to keep him interested in doing his homework, much less, something EXTRA outside of school and NOT graded.  Karson, on the other hand, jumps at the opportunity to do any and everything outside of school.  I guess it all balances out, but I would've loved to have done two projects--science is so neat. 

  HOW DO YOU GROW ROCK CANDY, you ask?  Well, we didn't just grow it, we needed an actual experiment so we compared two different strands for growing.  We did a non seeded strand (plain piece of yarn) and a seeded strand (a piece of yarn dipped in water and rolled in sugar crystals) to do our comparison.  The entire process took us a little over a week. We actually finished it weeks ago to allow for time to work on her MAGNIFICENT poster.  The project required quite a few elements, and we wanted to make sure nothing was left out.  Little did I realize, that it would be judged.  I thought the projects were simply for fun and education, but an actual rubric came home with instructions for grading/judging. 

After you develop you sugar strands, you make a sugar solution and divide it evenly among two clear glasses.  You attach your sugar strings to skewers on one end and a paper clip on the other.  And, after lowering the strands into the solution, you observe the changes for 7 days.

 Our solution on Day 7.  Our biggest observation: it's nearly impossible to grow rock candy on a string that doesn't start with a sugar coating.  We didn't see any change on that strand.  However, the sugar seeded strand grew and actually looked like the rock candy you see in store.

The finished product.

I tasted the rock candy, but it was really sticky and kind of a mess.  I decided it would probably be best not to hang onto it since the project wasn't due for another week or two.  We took pictures of all the stages of the process for her poster.

Here is her finished project.  I loved the hot pink poster--gives it something extra! 

 I purchased actual rock candy from Candy Craze in the mall.  

 Stages of the growth explained

We took her poster to school on Monday.  I helped her carry everything in that morning.  However, when we got to her classroom, there was a substitute teacher.  I was almost leery about leaving it in there because I knew it would be hard for Karson to carry it all single-handedly.  And, we had rock candy taped to the poster board which I knew could pose a problem.  I asked the sub if I could take the project to where it needed to go, but she told me they would make sure it got to the right place.  When Karson got home that afternoon, I could tell something was wrong.  She told me when she took her poster to the gym for set-up, her rock candy fell off the poster.  Our curriculum coordinator told her she would fix it, but I could tell Karson was bummed about it.  Fortunately, the next day (yesterday), we were out of school for election day.  We went to Plano to vote that morning, and I decided to go into the gym where the projects were set up and grabbed her poster and candy.  I took it back home and hot glued all the pieces onto the poster--those suckers weren't going ANYWHERE now.  Then, I took it back--worked out perfectly.

The science fair projects were displayed for parent and student viewing on Wednesday.  There were some really neat studies.

And guess who came home with a 3rd place finish for her grades, KARSON!

She couldn't stop talking about how excited she was about her 3rd place win.  I was proud of her!!!