During our apple week, we performed a fun and super simple experiment on apples. We got the inspiration for this experiment from this year’s Fall Bundle from Home and Haven Community. However, you can find this experiment all over Pinterest as well!
Before we started our experiment, we learned what oxidation is and how apples will brown when they are exposed to the air. We learned that ascorbic acid can help slow the oxidation process on the apple flesh. So we gathered 4 different sources of ascorbic acid for our experiment.
Because ascorbic acid can be found in many citrus fruits, we decided to use grapefruit, orange, lemon, and lime juice. Before we began, we noted our predictions. Which did we think would be the most effective at slowing oxidation? Which did we think would be the worst?
Then we labeled our bags and juiced our citrus fruits into their 4 different LABELED bags. You want to have your juice ready before you cut into the apple so the apple can go in the juice right away. Once the apple was cut up, we immediately put one slice in each bag. We left one slice out and put one in an empty bag labeled control.
We waited three minutes, then took the apple slices out to write down our observations. After we noted our observations, they went back in the bag and we left them for 10 more minutes.
At the end we took them all out to compare. It was easy to see that lemon and lime performed the best, but there wasn’t a huge difference. I would recommend using a variety of apple that naturally browns quicker to be able to easily see true results from this experiment. If we do it again, we will probably go with the Red Delicious apple instead of the Gala we used here.
I loved doing this experiment with the kids! It was super simple, but a great introduction to the process of making predictions and observations.
To see what books we read on this day of our apple week and the rest of our activities, check out this post!
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