The Things We Eat

In Savvy Scientists today, we ATE and ATE and ATE! We had lots of vegetables and fruits, though to ease your mind! We wanted to see if we could figure out what plant parts we were eating. We had broccoli, potatoes, apples, carrots, sunflower seeds, crackers, and pizza. What? Crackers and pizza??? Those aren't fruits or veggies! But... guess what? They are made from plants! Did you know cereal is even made from plants? Raisin Bran has grapes (the raisins) and wheat. Even the sweet stuff comes from plants (corn syrup, sugar... who knew?) We sifted through our food and classified which food went in the categories of roots, leaves, seeds, and stems. Then we looked at our pizza and deciphered which parts were plants. We determined that the crust was made of wheat, and the sauce is made from tomatoes. We even decided that pizza has garlic and herbs, and there is usually some sort of oil put on the pizza whether it be vegetable oil, olive oil, peanut oil, etc. So, before you take that next bite of food, think about what plants you might be eating. You would be surprised!

Components of Blood

Today we explored the four components of blood... in a tasty way! We used red hots to represent red blood cells, marshmallows to represent white blood cells, corn syrup to represent plasma, and sprinkles to represent platelets. What a sweet way to learn! While we were creating our tasty concoction, we reviewed the importance of each component of our blood. We remembered that red blood cells carry oxygen and nutrients through our body. White blood cells fight off disease. Plasma is the liquid that holds it all together, and platelets are what cause our blood to clot so we do not bleed to death when we get a cut. (We also learned a clot can be a bad thing if it forms in our arteries or veins, so we figured we better be careful eating too many sweets like the dessert we created today! We're definitely eating healthy next week!)

Coloring Changing Milk

For our first science experiment, we found out how we could make the color of milk change. We started by putting just drops of food coloring in different places around a plate of milk. We put a cotton swab in the middle to see if anything happened. All of the color spots stayed in one spot. Then, we dipped the cotton swab in dish soap and tried again. The colors exploded all over the milk! We found out that dish soap reacts to the fat found in the milk. The chemicals cause the fat to separate. After much discussion, we came to the conclusion that this reaction is why dish soap cleans our dishes so well. We also figured that this is probably why we use different kinds of soaps for different purposes (laundry soap, body soap, etc.)

Welcome!

Welcome to SYM's Savvy Scientist Club. Please visit the blog frequently for information regarding our club, as well as pictures from our AWESOME experiments! Remember, if you have a google account, you can sign in and choose to follow our blog. I'm looking forward to a fun and enriching time!