Ms. Stapleton’s 3rd Class set out to investigate how much sugar is in our favourite drinks. We brainstormed all of the drinks that we could think of.
We then tasted some of these drinks to see if we could determine which ones were high or low in sugar from the taste.
Next, we voted on what drinks we would like to include in our investigations. The drinks that we included were – Coke, Monster, Yazoo, Capri Sun, Red Bull, Lucozade Sport, Water, Apple juice and Ribena We made predictions which of these drinks would be high and low in sugar. We used our maths skills to make Tally Charts and Graphs to show our results. The majority of children predicted that coke would have the most sugar and that water would have the least amount of sugar.
We used our IT skills to carry out some research about sugar. We found out where sugar comes from, what it is used for and also the effects that sugar has on your body.
We decided a visual display of how much sugar is in each of the drinks would be most effective. At first we calculated how much sugar was in 100mls of each drink. We felt this was the best way to compare the amount of sugar in all of the drinks. For our display we decided a visual display of how much sugar was in the bottle would be better. To calculate the amount of sugar in 100mls of the drink and also in the bottle we read the label on the bottle of drink.This gave us the information we needed. We knew that every 4 grams of sugar was the same as one teaspoon of sugar. We calculated how much sugar was in both 100mls of the drink and in each bottle of drink as some bottles had a greater capacity than others.
Next we spooned the correct amount of sugar to show how much was in the bottle of each drink into clear plastic bags. For our display we hung these bags of sugar beside their corresponding drink.
We checked back at our predictions to see if we had been correct. We had predicted that Coke would have the most sugar when in fact it was Monster. We were shocked at how much sugar was in a Capri Sun. We were correct in predicting that water had the least amount of sugar with 0 spoonfuls.
We presented our findings to our school community at our science fair – children, teachers and parents. Four of our children were also interviewed by an RTE News2day reporter. Our interview was on the TV!
