Search Results for: blueberries
The Results are In!
I promised you results from the strawberry jars a while back. While the strawberry jars did not stink near as badly as the rice jar experiment I did previously, they didn’t reveal quite as important a message in my opinion. You could again definitely tell a difference in the scent of the jars, but the inside of the jars looked very similar. When I started this experiment all of the jars had fresh strawberries, so it is certainly possible there could have been a difference in bacteria etc. on the strawberries. If I were to do this again, I would have used frozen strawberries to make sure this wasn’t a factor. What surprised me the most is that the love jar smelled worse, in my opinion than the hate jar. There is probably some explanation for this. If I were to use fruit again, I would have used the blueberries. Also, if it was the first time for the experiment, I would have used the rice because they all smelled different and looked different reflective of the words love and hate.
Here are the backs of the jars pictured in the same order.
Does Fruit Have Feelings?
This post is a continuation of our previous water and rice experiments. The experiment is completely a product of child wonder and curiosity. After we spoke to rice for 30 days and saw the changes, the students wanted to try fruit, and they voted on blueberries. So that everyone was a part of the experiment, I put the blueberries in a baggy and put that baggy inside of a Wal-Mart sack to prevent leakage. Then I passed the bag around so that all of the students could have a turn squashing the berries inside the bag. Next, I put about a half of a cup of squished berries in three different clean jars and sealed them. With masking tape, one jar was labeled “LOVE” and the other jar was labeled “HATE”. A third jar was left blank as our control group. The children made predictions about what they thought would happen to each jar. Every day without prompting as the students would leave class, they would say, “I love you” to the love jar and “I hate you” to the hate jar. The blank jar sat by itself without being spoken to.
After 30 school days of speaking to the jars, we opened them…duh…dum…
So what do you think happened? Now, if you have been following the other two experiments, you may have an idea of what happened. The love and hate jars smelled distinctly different. The love jar smelled like sweet wine. The hate jar smelled more like vinegar. Of course, all of the jars had started a fermentation process. In fact, the jars had fermented so much that when I opened the lid it was pressurized to some degree and hard to open. There was actually a blue-grayish fog that came out of the love and hate jars when they were opened. The jar that had no name didn’t have a fog and neither was the smell very strong like the love and hate jars.
What explains all of this? Now, I can’t explain it, but there is something powerful about words and your students will figure this out after doing any of these experiments. This could lead to such a powerful discussion about talking to others in a kind way.
What do you think we did next? Well, I had one student who wanted to know what would happen if we started saying “I love you” to the hate jar and “I hate you” to the love jar. We did this for 30 school days with the same jars and same berries. We relabeled the jars with “hate” tape over the “love” tape and “love” tape over the “hate” tape.
(suspense building music plays here)…We opened the jars again after 30 school days of talking to the jars. I predicted that the jars would change and the love jar would turn the hate berries into smelling sweeter and the hate jar would turn the love berries into smelling more sour…BUT this isn’t what happened. The jars actually smelled the same.
What should we try next?
Does Water Have Feelings? {Science Experiment}
Well, it may not have feelings, but it responds when you talk to it. If you have been following my blog at all, you will know that in the fall we did an experiment with rice jars. We said, “I love you” to one, and “I hate you to another”. Then we let one jar just sit as our control group. If you want to read more about the rice jar experiment, go here.
After that experiment, it made kids become curious about what would happen if we repeated the same experiment, but with different items such as fruit or water. Well, we did repeat the experiment with water and repeated another experiment with blueberries. This post will be about what happened with the water experiment if you want to repeat it in your classroom or at home for that matter.
First we took three jars of exactly the same size and put the same amount of spring water in each one. I used spring water because I have a water cooler in my room. Then we put exactly 1 cup of water in each jar. We made a jar to say “I love you” to, a jar to say “I hate you” to, and a jar with no label that was just to sit as our control group. The kids in the classroom talked to the jars every day for 30 school days before they left the room. The jars just sat over the weekend, and they just sat if we had a day out of school. The students picked the jars up when they talked to them, but for the most part didn’t really pick up the control group jar.
Below, I put these against black construction paper so you could really tell the difference in the three.
Ironically, our 30 days ended on Valentine’s Day, so we opened the jars on February 14th. The control group jar just smelled like water and the water was very clear. The love jar didn’t have a really detectable smell to me but one of the kids said it smelled like cut grass. It was a little whiter in color than the control group water, but not very much. The love jar looked very similar to the control group. Next the big difference was in the hate jar. We could easily see that the hate jar had a cloudy white color to it compared to the other jars. It also smelled musty when we smelled it. More condensation was also on the sides of the jar. Upon close examination, we also noticed that the lid had grown mold or mildew on the top.
Below, in order the control group jar lid, the love jar lid, and the hate jar lid.
Ok, so I know the experiment isn’t perfect because the lids aren’t all the same, but I couldn’t find another one of the metal lids at the time, so I used the purple plastic one.
What a fantastic and powerful way to teach kids about bullying and kindness. The power of the kids’ words is evident when they speak to the jars without you having to say much. I do suggest you ask questions when the jars are opened such as:
Why do you think this happened?
How is this like when we talk to people?
Do you think your words affect people the same way? Why?
What do you wonder now?
Did our words really change the water? Was it just some bacteria that floated in the air? Were the jars clean enough? Was there bacteria in the water? What could explain these differences? (I feel like I am a script writer for Ripley’s believe it or not.)
Now, this happened not once–but twice. First, with the rice experiment and now with water! Something is definitely going on here. You don’t believe me? I dare you to try it at home for 30 days.
What will we do next? Well, the kids in my class decided that they wanted to put three NEW jars in boxes in separate corners of the room to talk to each day–so that is what we will do!
