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Did you ever open up a container from your refrigerator and find thefood inside all covered in blue, fuzzy mold? Yuck! But did you know you can grow it yourself and study it?

What you’ll need to study this stuff is two slices of bread (any kind that your mom has is fine), two peanut butter or jelly jars with lids, some water, a piece of cloth and a rubber band. Don’t forget you can ask your mom for this stuff if you can’t find it.

Here’s what you do:

Take the two pieces of bread and sprinkle some water on each slice. Take both pieces of bread and wipe it on a smooth surface, like thekitchen floor. This will cause the bread to collect small dust particles. Place one of the pieces you just wiped on the floor and put it into one of the jars and screw the lid on tightly. Put the otherpiece of bread into the second jar. But this time don’t put the lid on it. What you’ll do is to take the piece of cloth that you have and cover the mouth or opening of the jar with it. Secure it tightly with the rubber bands.

Put the two jars side by side in a warm, shady place in your kitchen or maybe your basement. If you’re not sure, ask your mom. If you want,you can loosen the cap to the closed jar so that a little bit of fresh air can get inside of it. Leave the jars for a couple of days to aweek. Check on them over this time to see what happens. You might want to guess to see which one of the jars will grow more mold. One ortwo spots of mold will probably appear on the bread that is in the air-tight jar. But, look at the jar with the cloth cover. You’ll see a lot more of the mold colonies on this piece of bread.

Here’s what happened:

The bread molds that you see are plants. These plants don’t have chlorophyll. Most green plants have chlorophyll. They use this to make food during a process called photosynthesis. However, without chlorophyll, the bread mold must use food made by others. Like a lotof animals, mold needs oxygen to use the food. The jar with the lid only contains a limited amount of oxygen so it only allowed a limited amount of mold to grow. But the jar with the loose cloth cover allowed a lot of oxygen to flow in and out of the jar. This allowed for mold to grow quicker than the other jar. You might even see different kinds of colors of mold growing on the bread slice. Microscopic mold sporesare everywhere around us, in the water, soil and air. When you wiped the floor with the two pieces of moist bread at the beginning of thisexperiment, many mold spores were picked up on the bread. That’s where they came from and the air helped them grow! Hang on to these two pieces of bread because we’ll use them for more research next week!