In Science, Year 6 have been looking at the many forms of fungi. Fungi takes many forms such as mushrooms, mould, and for this experiment we look at Yeast.
Yeast is a key ingredient in the art of making bread. This living organism is used to help make our bread rise. In todays experiment, we added yeast plus other substances such as sugar and cold water, sugar and warm water, sugar, salt, and warm water, and sugar, salt and cold water to sealed bags to see how the yeast would react when left to bloom with these added substances over time.
We found that in all cases, the yeast created gas, which started to fill the bag. You could see that the yeast with the sugar and warm water had a faster and more prominent reaction. The yeast with the sugar, salt and cold water reacted the least.
The sugar acts as a food for the yeast and the presence of warm water helped to create a speedier reaction. Basically the yeast produced more gas and quicker when mixed with warm water and only sugar.
We took some pictures of the experiment, which can be seen in the gallery below. Please click on the thumbnails for a larger view.