Kitchen Science 3-minute video · ages 4-8 · free coloring page
Why do cranberries float?
Plop! A cranberry in water doesn't sink. It floats! Why do cranberries float?
3 min
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Free coloring page
The scene from the video as a coloring page, plus the three-sentence answer, the experiment, and a QR code back to this page. One sheet, US Letter, black and white.
The answer in three parts
Why?
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Little empty rooms inside.
If a grown-up cuts a cranberry in half, you can see that it is not full all the way through. Inside, it has little empty rooms, called air pockets.
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Air is very, very light.
All that air inside makes a cranberry lighter than the same amount of water. And things that are lighter than water float, like a beach ball in a pool!
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Farmers use the floating trick.
At harvest time in the fall, they flood the bog with water. Then a machine gently shakes the vines. The cranberries come loose, and pop up, up, up to the top!
For grown-ups: Soon the whole bog is covered with a bright red sea of floating cranberries. The farmers use long floating fences to push the berries into a corner, like sweeping, and then pump them out of the water into trucks.
A tiny experiment
Try it!
Float, peek and bounce
You need: a few fresh cranberries, a bowl of water, a grown-up
- Drop a few fresh cranberries into a bowl of water. Do they float?
- Ask a grown-up to cut one in half, so you can find the air pockets.
- You can also try a gentle bounce on the table!
What happened? Cranberries float because of the tiny air pockets inside.
Did you know?
A good, fresh cranberry can bounce! Some farms test their berries by bouncing them. Mushy ones don't bounce, so they get left out. Long ago, some people even called them bounceberries!
Cranberries don't grow on trees, and not under water. They grow on low little vines, in soft sandy fields called bogs.
Your guide in this video
I'm Cranny, a little cranberry. Floaty, bouncy, and sour!
Cranny is a little round red cranberry with a tiny green stem.
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