The Three Bears Porridge Experiment & Size Sorting

Paul Galdone is February’s featured author for the Virtual Book Club for Kids. Paul Galdone is known for illustrating and adapting classic folk tales and fairy tales. We enjoyed reading his versions of the classics. This month we’re highlighting The Three Bears with a porridge experiment and size sorting activity. Amazon affiliate links are included below.

The Three Bears by Paul Galdone

The Three Bears by Paul Galdone is the familiar story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The bears go off on a walk while their porridge cools. Goldilocks intrudes upon their house and makes herself right at home eating the porridge, breaking baby bear’s {or the Little Wee Bear in Galdone’s version} chair, and sleeping in their beds. The bears come back and realize someone has been in their house. They catch Goldilocks sleeping in baby bear’s bed. Goldilocks jumps out the window and is never seen by the bears again.

The Three Bears Porridge Experiment

At the beginning of the story, Goldilocks tastes each bear’s porridge. She determines that the Great Big Bear’s bowl is too hot, the Middle-sized Bear’s bowl is too cold, and the Little Wee Bear’s bowl is just right. Have you ever thought about if this makes sense? Should the larger bowl have the hottest porridge? Should the middle-sized bowl have the coldest porridge? Why does the smallest bowl have porridge that is just right? We set up an experiment to test the results.

I made some oatmeal and scooped it into three different sized bowls. I placed 1/3 cup of oatmeal in the smallest bowl, 1/3 cup of oatmeal in the middle-sized bowl, and 2/3 cup of oatmeal in the largest bowl. {We figured the daddy bear would eat more than the others.} We didn’t add anything else to the oatmeal.

We measured the temperature of the center of the oatmeal with a digital probe thermometer. The small bowl was 170.6°F, the middle-sized bowl was 174.2°F, and the large bowl was 181.4°F.

We measured the temperatures again every 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, the small bowl was 150.6°F, the middle-sized bowl was 143.9°F, and the large bowl was 162.5°F. The middle bowl is the coolest? Maybe Goldilocks was right…

After 10 minutes, the small bowl was 121.6°F, the middle-sized bowl was 128.7°F, and the large bowl was 141.8°F.

After 15 minutes, the small bowl was 101.5°F, the middle-sized bowl was 110.5°F, and the large bowl was 122.2°F.

Our results show that the smallest bowl had the lowest temperature {except for after 5 minutes}. Why would Goldilocks have different results? Maybe the middle-sized bowl’s porridge was more spread out in the bowl – more surface area should cool the porridge faster. Maybe Mama Bear was the only one to add milk to her porridge. This would cool down the porridge for sure. What other explanations can you think of? As long as the bears were gone, all of their porridge would have been cold. What were they thinking??

If you repeat this experiment, do let us know your results! The more data we have, the more reliable our results can be.

The Three Bears Size Sorting

Sorting is a great activity for practicing classification skills. In this activity, I asked Aiden to sort the bears’ bowls, chairs, and beds by size. Aiden requested to sort the books the bears were reading as well. I just used clipart for the bowls, chairs, books, and beds. I drew the bear on the computer myself. You are welcome to download the Three Bears for personal or classroom use. Then, just grab some clipart to create your own size sorting activity.

Aiden cut apart the objects. Then, he sorted them by size onto the different bears.

He also recreated a scene from the book. He chose 3 different sized bears from his room and placed them in three different sized chairs. He added 3 different sized books for the bears to read.