Science Experiment for Little Ones: Fruit Floats, Fruit Sinks

It is truly amazing what a difference a visual material or experiment can do! It is true what an old saying says:"A picture is worth a thousand words". You can explain to your little one one concept over and over again and he/she will not get it. Demonstrate it to them once - BINGO!

Today Pumpkin and I were making an experiment with fruit floats.

This is an easy one which is great. We don't want to scare our kids off with complicated things in the beginning of their scientific journey. Every child knows what fruits are or at least saw most of them for sure. We made some observations and wrote them down afterwards.

For this experiment we will need:

• a number of different fruits(anything you have on hand; we had a banana, a plum, a grapefruit, a mandarin, an apple, a pear, a grape)
• 1 big container with water(for dunking the fruits)
• 1 sheet of paper/notebook to write down your observations
• a pen/pencil
• colored pencils/crayons

What to do:

Get your chart ready. It should consist of two columns:" floats" and "sinks".

Get your water container ready.

Put the fruits in front of your child and let him/her pick one at a time. Ask him/her what he/she thinks will happen to the fruit: will it sink or float? Then, ask the child to put the fruit in the container with water.

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Wait a second and ask again what he/she sees now. Make a note of your observation in the chart by drawing a picture of a sinking/floating fruit to the corresponding column. You might get surprised yourself which fruits float and which fruits sink.

My Pumpkin had so much fun! She asked me after we finished if I could give her some more fruits because she wanted to do some more experiments. Way to go!