Don’t you love when school cancels school before dinner for a snow day? Me too, not being up all night guessing, no making lunches, no alarm clock. But you know what I don’t like? When you wake the next morning and there is NO snow ❄️.
Let’s just say my girls were less than thrilled. So I needed something fun, engaging, and hands on ASAP.
After a quick run to the store (not for milk and bread), but for marshmallows and hot cocoa mixes. Ok I did buy milk, but only because we were about to make tons of hot cocoa for taste tests.
5 Sense Exploration
We started with simple taste tests and 5 sense exploration. Watching my 5 year old listen to a marshmallow and tell me to be quiet so she could hear it was wonderful. My oldest enjoyed tasting different kinds of marshmallows.
Marshmallow Challenge
Next, we moved on to a marshmallow challenge. Can you make the marshmallow sink? Despite their team work, we had to work through a ton of different ideas including salt, toothpicks, and even just holding down before we finally tried smushing it until it had no air left. FYI: when you try this you really need to smush it, even the slightest bit of air makes it float. It was a great lesson for my girls on density.
Hot Cocoa Experiment
After getting sticky with marshmallows and a quick play outside in the still no snow cold, it was time for Hot Cocoa. We explored what happens to marshmallows in different temperature hot cocoa. We drew snowman faces on our marshmallows and after some predicting, tossed our marshmallows into the hot, warm, and cold cocoa. After 30 minutes we came back to see what had happened to our beloved snowmen marshmallows. And it wasn’t pretty.
We finished up the day with an extravagant hot cocoa taste test of 5 flavors. We all had different favorites!
Now we are sugared up and ready for hopefully a real snowstorm tonight.
These science projects are great at home experiments, but I will also be using them in my pre-k classroom. We do the marshmallow and hot cocoa 5 sense taste test during our Christmas 5 senses unit. Then we do the hot cocoa experiments during our snow unit to show how heat melts items. The stem challenge is perfect for those long January afternoons. Grab the packet here and be sure to grab the marshmallows and hot cocoa too.
