The Colorful (and Delicious!) Sugar Star

Yesterday, Tater Tot and I had the house to ourselves. That rarely happens, and so we decided to take advantage of our freedom and try out some more experiments from the Stepping into Science kit. Tater Tot, never one to fall prey to moderation, chose seven experiments to try, all of them with the potential to create a very large mess. Of course.

We started with one called The Colorful Sugar Star, an experiment calling for colorful ink, sugar cubes, white paper, and water. The directions state that we drop a few drops of ink onto the sugar cube, let it dry, and then set it in a shallow dish of water. The idea is that the sugar dissolves in the water, the sugar particles move towards the edge of the dish pulling the ink along with it, forming a lovely star pattern. Insert a collective "ooh! aah!" here. It would have been helpful if the list of things needed for this experiment had included 'patience' along with the shallow dish and the pipette. The reality is that a four, almost five year-old does not possess the patience or self-control to perform the previously mentioned tasks.

The ink, being ink in the hands of a kindergartner, wound up on hands, faces (hers AND mine), clothes, the table, the paper, a wall, and the dog. A small amount wound up on the sugar cube. This being the fifth sugar cube in play due to the fact that the other ones kept not-so-mysteriously disappearing.


Once we succeeded in getting the ink on the sugar cube, I opened my mouth to explain that we needed to let the ink dry just as Tater Tot picked up the inked-up cube and plunked it into the dish of water. It dissolved almost instantly into a small, murky looking glob of sugary water that my always resourceful daughter then tried to drink. Apparently, sugar is too precious to waste on science experiments. Sugar star experiment, take 1: FAIL.

For our second attempt, we decided to try food coloring. It was about this point that it occurred to me that wearing white shirts probably wasn't the smartest choice. We need lab coats, but sadly, lab coats are also white.

Tater Tot veeeeery carefully dripped the color onto the sugar cube, and did a very, very thorough job of it. We set the cube aside and filled our shallow dish with water, and once again, she dropped the sugar cube right in. Sugar star experiment, take 2: FAIL.

This did lead us to a useful discussion on why experiments sometimes fail, though. We talked back over each of the steps, and then compared the directions with what we had actually done. Tater Tot, all by herself, concluded that the experiment hadn't worked because she hadn't waited for the ink to dry. Her conclusion: "I'm just not so good at waiting." Agreed.

We did work our way through the other experiments that she had picked out, but the sugar cubes were the highlight of the day. You just can't top the awesomeness of permanent ink, sugar cubes, and pipettes of water.

In addition to the sugar experiment, we created an air cushion boat by blowing up a balloon and attaching it to a small boat, forcing the air out the bottom and allowing it to hover across the table. When I asked Tater to punch out the cardboard figure that sits in the bow of the hover boat, she looked at me funny and then picked up the sheet, made a fist, and punched the tiny person as hard as she could. Bonus lesson for the day: alternate meanings of the expression "punch something out".

We learned how it is that heavy ships don't sink and the difference that shape makes in creating a vessel that can float by trying to float various clay shapes in a bowl of water. The flat raft did not float. The raft with curved up sides did float. Round shapes did not float. Boat shapes did. Tater Tot's ark floated. The ginormous clay ball did not. And dropping the giant clay ball onto the floating ark provided us with the perfect opportunity to try out the new phrase we had learned: "water displacement".


In all, we had lots of fun, made a big, soggy mess, and enjoyed having the time to ourselves. Tater Tot says her favorite experiment is the dragonfly one, though. I have no idea what that means. Maybe it's the code name for the experiment where she brainwashed me. How else did she end up getting to eat all those sugar cubes?