Soda and Science

Today our lesson in Science was all about soda pop!  We've been learning about solutions and suspensions in Chemistry, so this lesson took a closer look at the process of making our favorite fizzy beverages, and gave us a chance to try making our own as well.

Some things we learned about soda:

• it's the second most popular drink in the world, at 1 billion 8-ounce glasses of soda every day


• 70% of all sodas made are colas.  The second most popular flavor is lemon-lime, followed by pepper, root beer and orange.  All other flavors account for about 2-3% of soda sales


• the sweetener aspartame, used in many diet sodas, was discovered by accident


• the first carbonated soft drink was produced in 1794 by Jacob Schweppe


• a sealed can of diet soda floats in water, while a sealed can of the regular version sinks.  This is because aspartame is so much sweeter than sugar or corn syrup that diet soda is about the same density or slightly less dense than water.  (Kennady guessed the correct answer to the hypothetical question of which would float and why - WTG Kennady!)

After reading the lesson and discussing it, we gathered our ingredients to make a glass of "cola" and a glass of "orange soda"








Oh - before we started, the kids wanted to taste the club soda.  Well.... okay... if you really want to...







And here we go with some (hopefully) more palatable flavors:













I just love God's Design Science texts! 8-)