Dissolving Peeps | Simple Easter Science Experiment

Peeps, peeps, everywhere… there’s peeps. It’s a peep extravaganza around here lately! We are so in love with peeps activities that we have decided to redo one of our favorite peeps experiments and do a one week study on dissolving peeps.

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If you are a regular here, you might remember when we did our very popular dissolving peeps experiment using pumpkin peeps. This might even be one of our most popular science experiments we have ever posted. We love that experiment. In fact, every holiday the boys ask to do it again but with different themed peeps. This time around, I decided to entertain them and change our experiment just a tad.

Dissolving Peeps | Simple Easter Science

Setting up the Experiment

Materials:

One Package of Peeps Marshmallow Chicks (or your favorite Peeps for the holiday)

Glass Jars (we love reusing these awesome jars when we are done)

Lemon Juice

Apple Juice

White Vinegar

Water (for your control)

Optional:
Timer
Calendar

Set Up:

Set up is pretty simple. Fill your jars with equal amounts of liquid and place your peeps in each cup. You can use something like this to label your jars if you feel you won’t remember.

Make a few predictions, write them down and you are ready to go. We talked a lot about acids before getting started. Since we knew that last time the acidic liquids dissolved the peeps fastest, it would be good for us to test various acidic liquids against each other.

Conducting the Dissolving Peeps Experiment

With our peeps set up, we were ready to wait. We used our timer for the first few hours to document the immediate changes and then switched over to our calendar to record the changes each morning before breakfast.

This is just from one day of dissolving. You can see the differences already starting to show.

Making Observations and Noticing

One thing we weren’t expecting was to change the color of the peep in such a uniform way. In fact, we were pretty amazed. You see, the last time we did this experiment, we manipulated the peeps with toothpicks and moved them around. This time we left them to dissolve on their own timing and this was really cool to see.

When we looked through our magnifying glasses we were also able to see that only the sugar had dissolved in the water jar, but in the others, the gelatin was starting to deteriorate as well. This was the truth for the entire experiment. The water peep simply dissolved where the water touched the sugar but the gelatin stayed in tact.

However, the more acidic the liquid the more the peep dissolved.

One final finding (I will upload pics soon (its been rainy)… is that the apple juice and the water started to mold but the peeps in the vinegar and lemon juice did not. We think this has something to do with the sugar content, but now it makes us want to do some mold experiments to find out.