The purpose of this project was to determine which cereals we eat contain the most iron. What I loved about it was all the kids could be involved from age 8 to 3. But I have to admit, the results even surprised me when I found out that the most ‘natural’ of cereals has small iron filings added to them!
What you need: a strong magnet and three brands of cereal (one of which should be fortified with iron 100% daily intake of iron). We chose Lucky Charms, Raisin Bran, and Multi Grain Cheerios for our experiment.
Here is Allie’s hypothesis – “There will be “lots of iron in Raisin Bran” because it had real fruit in it.” Andrew’s hypothesis was the Multi Grain Cheerios would have the most iron although he said it was just a hunch…. (good hunch as we will see ;-))
How you do it: I did not share the Nutrition fact on the side of the box before we started the experiment. We took 1/2 cup of each cereal and crunched it up to a course dust. Of course the child who chose Lucky Charms got to sample the cereal. 😉
After we sufficiently crunched up the cereal we placed a magnet in the dust to see if any of the cereal would be magnetic. The result? No visible magnetized cereal with Raisin Bran or Lucky Charms!
Holy smokes! We have a winner in Multi Grain Cheerios – the most natural of all the cereals – or so we thought – was magnetic! We were all amazed!
Then we checked out the serving size for the iron content in each cereal and low and behold Multi Grain Cheerios won with 100% daily iron intake. Lucky Charms and Raisin Bran both had 25%
But this is where it gets really really interesting….
We decided to dump the Cheerio crumbs in a bowl full of milk and see if we could attract the crumbs with the magnet and what did we find? An iron FILING! Honest – see the circle I magnified above. I thought it was an eyelash at first until the thing was attracted to the magnet!
Then we decided that we would put the Cheerio mash into a plastic bag – similar to what Steve Spangler did here. Now the great thing about having a three year old help us that she can mash things to a pulp and that’s just what you want her to do! And check this out.
We literally were attracting iron filings out of our cereal!
Conclusion: We disproved our hypothesis that fruit would raise the iron content of cereal and concluded that the serving amounts were what we should look at when determining iron content. And we were honestly amazed that we are literally eating iron filings in our fortified iron cereal. The most natural of our cereals had filings added to it – how ironic!
Here is a video of how attracted a cheerio is to a magnet.
Wow… I wasn’t prepared to believe that until we saw it! How much iron is in your breakfast cereal? Sounds like a great science fair experiment waiting to happen!
This project was adapted from this book here. It contains 50 classic experiments that you should check out to inspire you for your next science fair.
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