A few weeks ago Danelle’s preschool did their regular Friday science section on Crystals. Later that day I asked her if they made crystals, and she said no. So I decided to try making some with her. I sort of ended up doing most of the work, but she enjoyed the process regardless, and especially the end result.
To make our crystal, I super saturated some sugar into water, without getting too much on the glass stove top even. I believe I used a ration of 2:1, sugar to water. Then I poured this into a clear tumbler so we could watch the crystal grow over time. To give the crystal something to grow on, I rigged up some string to a popsicle stick. Danelle helped me get the string wet and then we rolled it into some dry sugar and let that dry for a bit. We then lowered the string into the tumbler and set the lid over the top.
After a week, this is what the setup looked like.
The crystal was pretty cool, really showing off the squareness of the sugar.
One other thing we did at the start of the process was add a bit of orange flavoring to the sugar water. This resulted in a very tasty crystal that was devoured by two children as quickly as we could get pieces off the string. Overall a very sticky, tasty and successful science project.