I love AUTUMN!
While raking up (and jumping in) leaves earlier this week, my girls and I began chatting about the different colours of the leaves and why they turn the colours they do. I won't ruin any science exploration you might be thinking of doing but lets just say it includes cooler weather trapping sugars in the leaves of the tree.
But a handful of trees still wore robes of green - which prompted my girls to try and remember why leaves are green in the first place. The answer to that is chlorophyll. This led us to do a quick experiment to find out which leaves had the most chlorophyll.
We gathered five leaves from five different trees; a walnut tree, a birch tree and three maples (one sugar, one Japanese and one 'regular old maple').
We then brought the leaves into the kitchen and tore them into small pieces. We put each pile of leaf pieces into their own glass jar and labeled each jar. We then poured rubbing alcohol into the jars until the alcohol just covered the leaf pieces. To help the alcohol take up the green colour of the leaves, I put the glass jars into a tray of hot water and covered the whole thing with Saran Wrap. After about 15 minutes we replaced the water with fresh hot water and after about 30 minutes, each jar had GREEN rubbing alcohol.
When the alcohol was green we placed strips of coffee filter into each jar. Taping the end of the filter to the wall, with just the tip of the filter immersed into the alcohol. And then we waited.
After about 90 minutes, the green had travelled up the coffee filter. We put the coffee filters in an order from least amount of yellow and green to the most amount of green. This told us which leaves held the most chlorophyll! Our sugar maple had the most chlorophyll while the oak tree had the least!
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