Science Fair

The beauty of having a son who is in the 4th grade is that you get to participate in the school Science Fair. Harris and I chose, and by that I mean I because who really is the driving force behind many of these projects are the moms unless you are lucky enough to have a dad who is home in the evenings. Anyway, I am getting off track we chose to see which bread would mold the fastest white, wheat, or organic. Well, we thought the organic bread would mold the fastest because it would lack the preservatives that white or wheat have. We observed our bread for 12 days and nothing happened. Which is a mystery in and of itself because when you don't want the bread to mold it does. When we lived in Switzerland it only took a couple of days for our bread to mold. Go figure! A couple of things we think happened a) it has been cold up until the last couple of days thus delaying mold growth b) you need moisture and we haven't had any humidity c) you need mold spores and this comes from dirt, so maybe if I wasn't so picky about keeping a clean house then we would have had mold d) maybe we should have placed the bread in plastic bags; however, since I had to buy 5 loaves of bread for this project I had one loaf of white sitting on the kitchen counter, and there was no mold on it????? The funny thing was we picked this project because we thought it would be the easiest. Thankfully, it didn't matter that the experiment failed. They just wanted the children to have fun trying the experiments and learn how to document their results.

Comments

Melinda said…
that's always the way it goes--when you want something to go bad it wont! The plastic bags would have helped keep the moisture from the bread around so it would promote mold growth instead of just drying out.

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