St. Patrick's Day Flower Experiment

While Chaz and Anna were here we did some experiments with how flowers absorb/change colors. I had really wanted carnations but since I had a really difficult time locating any (I guess the stores had already changed all their white carnations green) we had to use some Mums and Baby Breath as well. Each of the kids set up a different experiment and we were able to watch and see what conditions allowed the flowers to absorb the most food coloring as the week progressed.

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Chaz's experiment was to see which flower absorbed the food coloring the best

Reagan's experiment was to see if hot or cold water was better Anna's experiment was to see if adding sugar to the water would help or hinder the absorbtion process

Kennedy's experiement was to see if a long stem, short stem or no stem (this last one was not intended but became necessary when Kennedy broke off a stem - it's okay it added another dimension with interesting and not entirely expected results - the best part of experimenting, right?)

The kids with their experiments

We realized we needed to add an additional experiment as the kids weren't sure why it mattered that we were careful to use/control the same amount of food coloring in our glasses. So Chaz decided Jackson's experiment would be one glass with a lot of dye and one with very little.

We had fun throughout the week watching what flowers changed colors and which didn't. When we began our experiments we asked everyone to tell us which they believed would work best in every experiment. Unfortunately we ran out of time before they left to discuss and review what specifically occurred in each of the experiments and why. The girls and I, however, did take the time to do this the following week and here is what we discovered. In Chaz's experiment Chaz believed the medium flower would absorb the most food coloring, Anna thought the Mum and Reagan and Kennedy both believed the Baby's Breath would. It turned out that Reagan and Kennedy were correct; the smallest flower did the best job of absorbing the food coloring. In the picture below, Jackson's experiment, we not surprisingly discovered that the flowers with lots of food coloring changed more than those with little food coloring. Not a shocking discovery but it helped in understanding the importance of consistency and controling variables during experiments.

We found the results from Anna's sugar experiment to be the most interesting. While everyone except for Kennedy predicted the water with sugar would absorb more food coloring it did not. In fact the sugar practically prevented any cood coloring from being absorbed. What was additionally interesting and you can't see it quite so well in this picture as you could in real life, was that the carnation with sugar water really filled out and grew a bit larger.

The Mum with the short stem in Kennedy's experiment of long vs short vs no stem turned the most quickly and completely. Anna was the only one who thought the short stem would do the best. What we found interesting about this experiment was that while the flower with no stem did change colors it did so unevenly and not as quickly as the flower with a short stem demonstrating that the stem is an important part of a plants absorption process.

While Reagan, Chaz and Anna believed the Hot water would help the flowers absorb more food coloring in Reagan's experiment we found there wasn't a significant differance. That may have been partially because we had a hard time controling the temperatures (although we did continue to add ice in a bowl around the cold cup). In anycase, it was interesting to think about and see how all of these variables influenced the absorption rates of all these different flowers. The added bonus of course was we had festive green flowers for St. Patrick's Day! :)