Co-op Science Week 29

What can we explore that takes only one hour?  Because that's about all the time we have left for this school year.

Aha, Bernoulli effect.  It's an interesting idea, and we can mess around with some fun stuff.

After I explained what the Bernoulli effect was, we tried blowing over the top of crepe paper streamers to raise them up.  We also blew between 2 streamers to bring them closer together.

We made long, long tubes of plastic from Diaper Genie refills and blew them up with our breath.

We floated a ping pong ball on top of the flow from a hair dryer.  This was the most popular event, by the way.  You can tilt the hair dryer from side to side, and it looks like the ping pong ball is defying gravity.

We blew out a candle that was hidden on the other side of a tall can (I used a can of Trader Joe's Peppermint Hot Chocolate, a short candle, and an adult to be in charge of re-lighting the candle).

Then, continuing the theme of messing around with air, we made rockets out of Kool-Aid Burst bottles.  We had emptied out a bunch of these over the weekend thanks to a backstage workday for my kids' theater group.  I'd tried making a rocket at home using a regular straw for the inner straw, and a milkshake straw for the outer straw, but, alas, it was a dud -- the outer straw was too big.  I rummaged around and discovered that we had 2 boxes of regular straws, but one set was just a tiny bit greater diameter than the other -- it worked perfectly that way!  Add in the clay left over from last weeks clay boats, and we had rockets!

Except as the kids were experimenting one lamented, "I wish I could put fins on this, because I could do something really cool then...."  Aha, I had brought scrap paper, scissors, card stock and tape just for the occasion.

We had various competitions.  And at one point a firing squad.  Then some of the kids decided they preferred to simply blow on the inner straw.  I think that was the original design of this type of rocket -- I've seen it in older books written back before Kool-Aid Burst existed.

One class period left to go!