It is so much fun to do science experiments with candy!
With Valentine’s Day coming up and conversation hearts everywhere we decided to experiment with them, but you substitute any type of candy if you can’t find conversation hearts.
Candy Science Experiment Supplies:
- conversation hearts or other candy
- water
- vinegar
- honey (or other sugary substance)
- salt/salt water
- microwave or freezer
- bleach
The supplies can be easily switched for any item your kids want to test, these are just the ones my kids picked!
Basically we wanted to see what would happen to the conversation hearts as we added each item to them. The kids wrote or drew each item on their papers and predicting what they thought would happen.
We then added 1 item at a time (salt, honey, water, vinegar, salt water, etc) or put them in the freezer or microwave and recorded our observations.
The water dissolved the candy after awhile. The vinegar bubbled on some of the candies at first, but not others, until eventually it all bubbled up and dissolved. Honey didn’t react and neither did microwaving or freezing–I was surprised about the microwave results!
The salt alone had no effect, but salt water did. A reader reported that adding bleach was very cool and pulled the sugars from the candies upward–we can’t wait to try it!
After we were done we talked about why we thought our predictions were correct or incorrect and looked for patterns in the results.
Candy science experiments are a great way to get kids to think like a scientist and practice their problem solving skills!
Love this activity! Plus does anyone really like to eat those candy hearts?
I do!
Ha!
Exactly, I think they taste gross. Great project to make them useful. 🙂
Ha! Me too!!! Thank you!
I DO! They are the biggest reason I look forward to Valentines Day lol
LOL! 🙂
Nope and not anyone that I know does.
Lol! I don’t Trisha Stanley!
Oh, my boys would love this. Great homeschool project.
Thanks so much Crystal & Co.!!!!
What a fun experiment. My boys would love this!
When I taught school, I would give each child a box of candy hearts . They had to use the hearts to write a story. They would glue the hearts on their paper in place of writing the real words. For example, I found my “true love” today while walking in the “beautiful” park. The brighter kids would write some amazing stories!! The funniest one I ever had was from a gifted boy who wrote negatively. “I will never have a “cute” and “sweet” girlfriend. It went on and on and was hilarious!
That is awesome Candice!!! I adore that idea!
This is awesome! I am going to have the kids do this for their Valentine’s party at school. Thanks for the great idea.
Yay!!! Thanks Laurie!
Just did this experiment with my two middle school girls. We added baking soda which was neat cause one of the hearts floated up. We also poured bleach into a clear jar and added 2 hearts. This was really neat to see the results.the bleach was pulling the sugars from the candy upwards. Thanks for sharing this on Pinterest.
Wow! I am totally trying that Kim!!! How cool!
We just shared these because they are purely AWESOME!!!
You rock quirkymomma.com!!!! 🙂
How fun and Interesting! Any pictures of the results?
I didn’t really share any so anyone who wanted to try it would be surprised (or not!) too. 🙂
Where is the data?
Hi Nicole! I didn’t want to ruin it for anyone else by giving away what happened–let’s just say we were definitely surprised a couple times!
Did you ad each item separately? Or sep container for each….ive never done these and thought this could make a good 5th grade science experiment, thanks
We did them all in separate jars, but combining some at the end would be interesting too!
I don’t have any little ones. I think you should have shared our original opinion and then the outcome. As it isn’t little kids reading this how to do, it is us adults.
Hi Diane! The post was meant to be more about using something fun like candy to get kids using science than about replicating our exact experiment, but I’ll recap some of it for you. I don’t want to leave you hanging! Basically we set up different jars and added each item. The water dissolved the candy after awhile and the vinegar bubbled with some at first, but not others, eventually it all bubbled up though. Honey didn’t react and neither did microwaving or freezing. The salt alone had no effect, but salt water did. If you have some lying around you should try it! A reader reported that adding bleach was very cool.
I’m so glad you shared this info!!! I don’t have easy access to a microwave, so if I had crammed 22 2nd graders around a microwave and nothing happened, I probably would have been annoyed! Thanks for this.
Yes! That would be crazy. 🙂 It sounds like they would really like the bleach though.
Doing this with my kids tomorrow! Thanks for the idea. 🙂
Great! Have fun!
Adore this!!!!
I teach 3 and 4 year olds and one year I brought in a bag of those hearts and challenged them to see how many they could stack on top of each other before the tower toppled over. They then recorded their “findings” on a sheet I had designed. Some of them wrote the number, some of them drew their tower, others scribbled. 🙂 All had a good time!
i don’t like this idea at all because what if u have a 2 year old and a 3 and 10 and 7 and 5 and 9 and 3 and a newborn and they want to drink something they will get sick and go to the hospital
Really – if you don’t like the experiment because you are unable to watch all of the children and are worried about them drinking the specimen jars then don’t do the experiment. It’s as easy as that. To say you don’t like the experiment because a kid can end up in the hospital is absurd. Common sense is needed to do any activity with kids and obviously you need to supervise them. This is a great experiment and I am extremely happy it was posted. We had lots of fun trying different ingredients on the candy hearts and recording our results.
How fun! Thanks for updating it with your results. It’s good to know what direction to go. I would personally skip the bleach even though it sounds fun, except for as an activity with pretty old kids. Bleach is just so dangerous. Here are some fun ways we’ve used candy hearts in our homeschool — graphing, estimating, subtracting, writing, crafting, etc. 🙂 http://www.examiner.com/article/candy-heart-homeschool
Saw Steve Spangle put several hearts in an almost full glass of clear soda. hearts rise to top.. fall to bottom & rise to top from CO2. Dancing hearts!
FUN!!!!
Would be good to include an explanation of why the different things happen. I’m assuming it’s because the sugar in the hearts reacts with the bleach, salt water, etc, right?
We used Hydrogen peroxide. It dissolved the edges of the candies and the sugar floated up to made colorful heart rings on the surface.
Totally trying that!!!!!! Thanks for sharing!