Christmas Candy Science Experiment

Simple Preschool Science Candy Dissolving Activity

We made a fun and simple gingerbread house this past week with Liam’s preschool class: Graham crackers, icing, and lots and lots and lots of candy. Yikes, so much candy and he wanted to eat it all! I thought doing a simple dissolving science experiment with some of those treats might be fun! We never did try this type of science experiment during Halloween, so I thought this would be a great chance to find some other uses for the mountain of candy we had on this one dish.

Christmas Candy Science Experiment Set Up

This is really a very easy experiment to put together! It’s so much more about making observations, talking about ideas and making guesses! All you need is lots of candy and some different liquids to test the dissolving rate of the candy. I chose water, oil and vinegar. We picked off three each of four different kinds of candy.

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Candy Science Experiment Preparation

I let him pour the liquids and we talked about how they might dissolve the candy. I asked him if he knew what dissolving meant, and he said they will melt. Not bad. He really couldn’t guess which liquid would dissolve the fastest, so we started adding the candy!

He added one of each candy to each liquid and we watched. We saw some pretty immediate changes and then checked in every so often! You will see he below photos range from 15 mins all the way to 3 hours. He observed the water made a whole lot of changes and the oil made no changes to the candy. The vinegar also affected the candy pretty good too, even the lollipop stick was affected! He was amazed by the results! Then he asked for a treat!

Water

Oil

Vinegar