Sid the Science Kid has an episode about Sid’s banana turning brown. In it the characters learn about how food changes by examining pumpkins in various stages of ‘ripeness’ including decay. Cutie Pie decided he wanted to document the changes in his Jack-o-lantern this past Fall and diligently took pictures of it often hoping to prove his theory that pumpkins decay over a period of time. I recently came across these pictures again and he was excited to share his observations.
The first image you see is of our Jack-o-lanterns on Halloween night. The second is from a day or two later. Cutie Pie observed the pumpkin itself hadn’t changed much, but that it’s shape had changed due to something eating it for meals. Over the course of the next few days he discovered squirrels like pumpkins, but not the seeds as they were scattered around the food source as well as left inside it. Even several weeks later the pumpkins’s basic form was the same, however by this time the inside was becoming covered with mold. Cutie Pie hypothesized it takes longer for a pumpkin to decay than a banana because it is larger in size and kept cold at night. We haven’t tested this yet. He also hypothesized the mold grew because rain had gotten inside and made it soft, one more thing we have not tested. Eventually the pumpkin became soft and sort of mushed into the ground with most of it becoming black, just like in the episode of Sid. (At which time he was OK with shoveling it into the trash, much to our delight!)Cutie Pie was excited to see the result to his experiment was almost exactly the same as on the show. He was also happy that this meant his theory that pumpkins decay over time was accurate! I was impressed that he was so diligent in taking pictures, rather in having me take pictures and telling me exactly what he wanted pictures of, to record this experiment! Do you experiment with your kiddos? We’d love to hear about some of your experiments! Please share a link so we can check them out!
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