Floating fruit

We are learning to give a hypothesis and to conduct an experiment.

Today my initial question was; 

What will happen if I put an orange in water?

We made a chart predicting whether it would float or sink.

Then we watched carefully as the orange was put in the water. The orange floated on top of the water.

I then asked the children what would happen if I peeled the orange, there were various predictions so we created another list. 

There was some excitement when we discovered that the peeled orange sunk!

Our discussion about why this happened made us think about other fruits  and led us to investigate further.

Getting a big plastic container we added 

* an apple (it floated)

* a pear (it sunk)

* a banana (it floated)

* a kiwifruit (it sunk)

However, we do have curious minds in Room 3, so we investigated more by cutting the fruit in half  and then peeling the banana to see if we would get any differing results. 

The big question of the afternoon was this:

  Why did a peeled orange sink but a peeled banana still float????