Our “Cheeky Raisins” experiment has been a massive success!

We started with two glasses of water – one with ordinary tap water and the other filled with soda water, and did not tell the children and parents that there was any difference between them. We then asked children to take two raisins from the box and drop one into the tap water and one into the soda water and see what happened.

One child quickly spotted the difference between the two glasses, observing that “the water is different”. When asked how it is different, he said the soda water glass “has bubbles in it”.

Millipedes also noticed a difference, spotting the bubbles in the soda water and pointing out that the raisins in that glass were going “up and down!” and “floating” and “splashing” in the water. They described them as “funny raisins” and “cheeky raisins”!

The raisins in the other glass however were “not going up and down”. When asked why they thought this might be, one child suggested that maybe the raisins are “bigger” and therefore heavier than the ones in the soda water. Another child said the raisins were not moving “because they’ve gone to sleep”. Once one child pointed out that there were no bubbles in the still water, the children came to a collective conclusion that the raisins were sitting on the bottom of the glass because there was “no gas”.

They also observed that some of the raisins were stuck together and thought that maybe some of the raisins were being rescued by the ones that were stuck to them.

We absolutely loved this experiment! Well done to our children for their brilliant scientific thinking!