Being a teacher means I’m generally time poor, but having a good cup of tea is extremely important to me. I challenged the class to find out which shape tea bag will infuse the quickest, allowing me to make the most of my time in the morning. We compared circular, rectangular and ‘pyramid’ tea bags to see if it had an impact.
Some of the children wondered whether the cost of the teabag had an impact on infusion rate and chose to investigate this too. Child-led learning has great results. Lucky I kept the receipt!
Our findings were not completely the same across the class but generally we accepted that the ‘pyramid’ shaped tea bags infused the quickest. We reasoned that it was likely to be because there were more faces to the tea bag, allowing more of the tea to access the water and create an infusion.
Some of the children found the most expensive tea bags, Twinings English Breakfast (a costly 5p per bag!), to be the slowest to infuse. We reasoned that perhaps more intense flavour took longer to create an infusion, or perhaps the bag it was made of was a more expensive material which was thicker. The other tea bags produced mixed results.
Time to stock up on tea bags!
This was a really fun activity
We found out that the pyrimid shape teabag infuses faster because of the more faces it had 👍