Tea Taste Test and Mixing Science Experiment

The T is for Tea Time theme gave us many opportunities to explore the five senses. In addition to playing a sense of smell matching game and painting with tea bags, we did this tea taste test and mixing experiment.  It was one of those activities that I thought would take just a couple of minutes but turned out to be a full morning of experimentation and exploration. In fact this initial introduction to tasting tea and experimenting with mixing new flavors has inspired a new interest in both tasting tea and mixing up new creations.

I will provide a bit of a disclaimer in that we are not a tea drinking family. If you and your family drink tea often, you may cringe at how we made our tea and did this activity. But forgive me…it’s all in the name of fun and learning, right? 🙂

 Materials

• Celestial Seasons Fruit Sampler (or any preferred collection of caffeine free teas)
• Tea cups
• Tea pot
• Warm water
• Small dishes (or extra tea cups)
• Dropper (optional, but used for incorporating fine motor practice and helping limit the amount of tea transferred)

Procedures for Tea Taste Test

First Lovey added a different tea bag to each tea cup. You could incorporate literacy by adding a label with the name of each kind of tea in each cup. This would also help your little scientist know which teas they are testing. We discussed this verbally, but it would have been easier to have the labels.

Then she filled each cup about half full with warm water. We let the tea sit for a few minutes and she observed the change in the water color. After mixing the tea with a spoon we removed the tea bags.

Next she smelled the tea in each cup in hopes of predicting which one she thought she might like best. She wasn’t impressed with any of the scents, and she predicted that she wasn’t going to like any of the teas.

Then we moved on to the taste test and took a sip of each tea.

As she predicted, she didn’t like any of the teas, so we decided to test whether she would like any of them mixed together.

Procedures for Mixing New Tea Flavors

First she used the dropper to combine different kinds of tea into the smaller bowls.

She spent a lot of time mixing and testing to see whether any of the combinations tasted good to her. There was a lot of trial and error, but overall she still wasn’t impressed.

Finally she remembered that I add sugar to my coffee to make it taste sweet, so she asked for some sugar. She added and added and tasted and tested.

And when it was JUST RIGHT, she was so pleased with her creation! Everyone in the house had to try her very sweet new tea flavor, “Fruity Sugar.”

This post concludes our T is for Tea Time series. I hope you had fun exploring tea bags with us. We’ll be back with another alphabet series after the holidays.

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