Can You Ripen a Green Tomato? Let's Experiment!

Last week, a few of our pre-k students harvested the last of the tomatoes from our garden. They noticed that most of the tomatoes were still green. 

I asked the pre-k class these research questions:

How do we ripen green tomatoes?

There is an enzyme in tomatoes called ethylene, if the enzyme is released, the tomatoes will ripen. 

I asked, what do you think we could do to help release the ethylene?

The pre-k children had lots of ideas!

I think…

MT- Put them in the sunlight and water them.

DW- Leave them in the sunlight for ten months.

MH- We put them in water for eleven minutes and eleven days and then we just put them in the sunlight after we take them off of the tray.

MH- Why don’t we put them in sunlight and then water them after they are in sunlight?

EW- Put them in the sunlight over there (by the window) for sunlight and then put them in the box

LW- Put them in the sunlight in both front windows and then, put them in the back with less windows.

We set up a few control batches of the harvested tomatoes.

One control batch we washed, dried, and placed in paper then stored them in a cardboard box, away from sunlight. We also added one banana to the box.  I asked, why do you think I added a banana? EW “For a chemical reaction!” What makes you say that?! “You told us that, yesterday!”  

We then determined which window allows the most sunlight into the classroom; we place the other control batch in that window sill. I, of course, invited all of the children to have one green tomato on their table to observe over the course of our experiment. On day one, I asked them to put on their figurative science hats, goggles, and lab coats, and to document the date and to draw the current state of their tomato with much detail.

We will observe the control tomatoes over the next few weeks and let you know what we discover.