Lemons into lemonade

Dexter arrived at Kindy with a lemon.  He told us he wanted to make lemonade, so after getting a few more from the supermarket we pulled out the juicer and set about our task.  We first tried juicing them the old fashioned way, by cutting them in half and squeezing them by hand.  Because it was a hot afternoon and we had our juicer on hand, we put the rest through it.

We talked about the mechanics of the juicer, and the ways it was similar to our manual hand juicer, before watching it do all the work for us by separating the juice from the pulp and pushing the juice into the jug waiting underneath.

After our lemons were juiced, we added a couple of table spoons of sugar to balance the sourness, then some water before we were able to taste test.  It was unanimous - it was delicious! 

This experience stimulated lots of discussion about everyone's likes and dislikes in relation to food and drink.  Lots of suggestions were made about what we could juice next - Apples, pineapples, pears, oranges, mandarins and even bananas!

It was such a popular, fun and educational experience that we revisited it again the next day with apples.  This time it was A LOT more difficult to get any juice out of the apple with the hand juicer.  We talked about why that was, and tamariki shared their observations about the differences between apples and lemons.  We then set about putting our apples through the juicer.

 

Once juiced, we only needed to add water to the concentrated apple juice, as the apples are sweet enough on their own.  Once again, it was unanimous - Delicious!  Such a fun way to spend a summers day, learning about the properties of our food and how to make the juice that we are used to finding in our supermarkets.  We have reserved the pulp from the apples and look forward to making apple muffins one day soon.