We continued our journey of life cycles this week. We acted, drew, wrote and finally tasted the process of popcorn from start to finish.
Our PK and YK acted and drew and wrote about the life cycle, including learning more about the processing plant and truck to store. The corn doesn’t magically appear in your kitchen does it? The MK discussed the energy it takes from humans, sun, earth, more humans, processing power, truck and fuel, electricity or gas to run your stove or microwave.
The idea of where a product comes from will be one we talk about throughout our year. This topic can be called; start to finish, farm to fork, field to fabric or even our ecological footprint. Once the investigation was complete, the MK got to experiment with “dancing corn.” we used good ‘ol baking soda and vinegar to excite our sunken kernels into a dance.
OK had a similar but more in depth conversation regarding the corn to popcorn cycle and finished with a STEM challenge using “candy corn.” Although we rated this activity as an EPIC fail, because the candy broke and no one was unable to build their tower above 1 story high…we used our tenacity, patience and spoke of failure as a BIG part of science. They did get creative in 10 minutes of sticky fun. Next time we will use marshmallows or use all those left-over candies.
