Science Project

Fourth grade means a lot of things, and that includes mandatory participation in the school's science fair.  Callie was unsure of what type of project to do, and after several conversations that involved pulling teeth, she landed on an experiment involving the acidity of drinks.

John and Callie got the opportunity to go to the store to purchase a wide array of beverages for the experiment.  Mrs. Fehr, the science teacher at Cassidy, truly made this as easy as possible by outlining four different phases of activities each student needed to complete.  But when it came down to it, we still needed to block out a good three hours to execute the experiment according to her outline.

Of course it is important that the student do the work for the project, so we made sure that Callie did the heavy lifting with a little guidance from her mother and a lot of patience from the entire family.  Once we got going, Callie certainly got into it, which helped.

We also decided to take lots of pictures since one of the requirements of the science fair was to put together a poster board illustrating the steps of the experiment as well as the findings.  Fortunately our newly renovated kitchen had a lot of room available for Callie's displays.

This is one example from the ten beverages Callie tested.  On the left is the red cabbage solution (aka the acid indicator), the middle cup contains lemonade, and the cup on the right shows what happens when the two were mixed.  The red color shows the relatively high acidity of the lemonade.  Although Callie did not win any medals in the science fair, she received an A on her project and learned a lot about what it takes to devise and execute an experiment, and that was the whole point of it anyway.  Good stuff all around.