STEM Activity: Cool Off With Homemade Popsicles This Summer

As summer heats up, there’s no better way to stay cool and satisfy your sweet tooth than with icy, fruity popsicles. Instead of reaching for store-bought ones, try making your own delicious frozen treats at home! It’s a great way to have fun with STEM in the kitchen, and you can customize ingredients and flavors to your liking.

Materials Needed:

• Blender
• Cutting board (optional)
• Fruit of your choosing
• Honey or other sweetener of choice
• Lemon juice (optional)
• Molds, like these, or you can use cups, ice cube trays or muffin tins you might already have
• Knife (optional)
• Wooden popsicle sticks (if sticks are not included with your molds)

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Select the fruits you’d like to use in your popsicles, like strawberries, blueberries, peaches, oranges or pineapples. Consider which combinations of fruits might produce the tastiest popsicle!
    
2. You can use either fresh or frozen fruit – both will give you the same type of result.
    
3. If your fruit is larger, you might consider dicing it into smaller pieces using a knife and cutting board with adult supervision.
    
4. Add your fruit pieces, honey or sweetener and lemon juice (to taste) to a blender and blend until smooth.
    
5. Pour the mixture into your mold(s), adding a popsicle stick in each one, then place your popsicles in the freezer.
    
6. Once frozen, remove your popsicles from their molds and enjoy!

What Are We Discovering?

Not only does this activity provide you with a tasty homemade treat, but you can explore STEM as you create it!

The three most commonly known physical states of matter are solid, liquid and gas. In a solid state, molecules are packed tightly together. In a liquid state, molecules can flow easily around one another, but are held together by attractive forces. Liquids, unlike solids, take the shape of their container.

When you blend up your fruit mixture, you turn mostly solid items into a liquified substance. As you pour that liquid into your molds and freeze it, you are freezing the molecules, slowing down their movement so they stick to one another. When you take your newly formed popsicles out of the molds, they have returned to a solid state for you to enjoy.

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