Over the weekend, Meredith suddenly very excitedly started chattering about her “mama apple” and wanting to see it. It took me a minute to realize she meant our mummified apple project. It had been less than a week so I wasn’t confident anything would have happened, but I didn’t want to dampen her enthusiasm so we went and pulled them out to see what we could see.
To my surprise, the “control” apple was already getting mouldy. I guess that’s the humidity here working! We probably could have left it longer for more of an impact, but we go with the flow. We checked the apple out and Meredith spent a little bit just looking at it. I’m not sure what she was thinking but she seemed very engrossed so I made sure not to interrupt.
Once she was done with the control, Meredith carefully spooned our natron mix into a bowl. I asked her if she thought the mummified apple would be mouldy and she said no, though she wasn’t sure what to expect. The mummified one had shrunk and gotten very dark. “Like the mummies!” She did connect that to the game she’s been playing on the computer and the book about mummies that she likes to look at, because they all say fairly clearly that mummies get smaller and darker. That’s the salt/baking soda left on the apple, not mould.
After she was done examining and comparing both apples, she turned to play with the natron mix. “Mama, it’s very wet!” And so it was. I was actually surprised at just how wet it was.
She asked me if it was because of water from the apple, which is kind of neat as obviously she is retaining a lot of the information she’s been asking me about and we’ve been reading together. At her age, I try to keep things simple and not overload the information, so I just told her it was partly from the apple and partly from the air. She seemed satisfied with that and went on playing with it for a while.
Over all this was a very fun project for her, and one that she could do a lot of the steps fairly independently already. She loved setting it up and checking on the apple. I think if she’s interested in things like this again in the future, we will definitely repeat it, though next time I’d like to leave the pieces longer.
What a cool project to try! I think we’ll have to try sometime too. I’m sure Lily and Leif would both enjoy it, especially because they love knowing more about Egyptian times and culture.