Sugar Candy

Put some water in a jar and taste a bit with a straw.
Drop in a sugar cube and let it sit without stirring for a minute. With the straw, taste a bit of the water from the top of the jar. Now taste a bit from the bottom. Is there a difference?

Let the sugar cube dissolve completely, tasting the top and bottom now and then. Where did the solid go? Did the sweetness of the sugar make it to the top of the jar?

Add more sugar to your water, a spoonful at a time. Stir each time until the sugar all dissolves and disappears. How many spoons of sugar did you add before the sugar would no longer disappear? The solution is saturated with sugar at this point. Now heat your solution in a microwave or in a pot on the stove. Do the sugar crystals disappear as the water gets hotter? Let the water come to a boil. Carefully remove the solution from the heat and continue adding sugar, spoonful by spoonful until no more will dissolve. Now heat the solution again until the final crystals disappear. Place your jar of hot solution in a cool place where it can sit undisturbed for a few days. As the water cools, the solution will become supersaturated, containing more solute than would normally dissolve at that temperature.

You can recover some of the sugar from your supersaturated solution and make it into candy you can eat. Take a clean piece of cotton string and tie one end around a pencil. Tie a paper clip to the other end. Rub a few sugar crystals into the string. Place the pencil across the mouth of the jar and let the string hang down into the sugar solution. After a few days, the sugar will slowly come out of the solution and form beautiful crystals all around your string.