We spent first half of the class making our posters proclaiming that we are "3rd-5th" "SCIENCE" "CLASS". Three separate posters, one of which had the option for drawing "whatever you want ... but remember that your parents and younger siblings will see this."
"I draw mice with machine guns all the time." I just rolled my eyes at that one.
I apparently should've specified that it was inappropriate to draw a picture of a classmate, complete with name label, that showed her being shot with a cannon. Even if you apparently have a crush on that little girl (because, yeah, we all figured it out).
Then we went down to the display area where I hung up the posters over our table. Then handed out spaghetti and mini marshmallows for a reprise of the engineering challenge I showed a picture of here. Three of the kids hadn't done this before, having joined the class after Christmas. It was satisfying to be able to show off the creations this time.
No pictures since the kids' name were plastered all over everything -- the posters, the marshmallow-spaghetti creations, and all the other little bits I'd saved this semester (clay boats, booklet on making soda, etc.).
We had an Open House that evening, displaying all of the things all the co-op has done this year.
And now WE ARE DONE!
Coming up next year: I'll be teaching middle school earth science.
Showing posts with label co-op science grades 3-5. Show all posts
Showing posts with label co-op science grades 3-5. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Thursday, April 26, 2012
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!
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!
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Co-op Science Week 28
Density, part 2
We once again headed down to the kitchen to work on our investigations with density, using the activities from chapter 7 of Inquiry in Action
After a review of last week's work, the kids broke into 4 groups. Each group had 2 clear cups of room temperature water. They also received a little cold water which was tinted blue, and hot water tinted red. They used eye droppers to put this in the cups of room temperature water, and noted where the colored water tended to float (note: I supplied white cardstock to set under the cups to make it easier to see the colored water). Overall, this is a tough activity for kids -- some of them don't have the coordination to gently squeeze water out of an eyedropper, and it's also hard to see where the colors are tending to float. On the other hand, it's an easy activity to set up, inexpensive, and really does show that cold water sinks and warm water rises. And then kids asked if they could drink the colored water, sigh, since we must have a big fuss about eating or drinking just about anything quasi-consumable in this class.
To finish off that concept, I did the ever-popular jars-of-water demo. I once again used my glass jars from Frontera guacamole mix (at this point I've decided these are one of my favorite science tools -- easy to clean, easy to remove the labels). This time I made the hot water yellow and the cold water blue. Photos are from practice at home. I put the hot water on top of the cold water first, using a playing card to hold the water in the jar (I tried an index card, but when index cards get wet they get sticky -- the playing card had a slicker coating on it). As you can see, the colors stayed separate for a while
while I tipped the cold blue water on top of the yellow. Which, of course, instantly mixed.
From there we progressed to the Diet Coke vs. regular Coke in a tub of water. The Diet Coke floats because it's actually less dense. Which worked just great at home BUT when I got to co-op I asked someone else to fill the tub I was using, a clear plastic file box, and leave it on the counter. What I didn't realize is that she filled it with ice cold water. Which, of course, was more dense. So both Cokes sank. But, hey, we had just done a demo about hot vs. cold water, so hopefully the kids realized why it was sinking. Frankly, they were mostly going on and on and on about wanting to drink the Coke.
Anyway, we forged ahead -- I asked how we could get the cans, particularly the regular Coke, to float. Someone suggested salting the water, which was a great idea. But I had brought bubble wrap, which I stuck around the can. I explained that we had increased the volume of the object without increasing the mass by much, and thereby changed the density -- sort of the same way life jackets worked. Then I pulled out 4 clear plastic shoeboxes, which we filled half way with water, a bunch of plastic toys from home (insects, animals, and cars), along with some corks (I got those from the wine cork recycle bin at Whole Foods), some styrofoam (I couldn't find any packing peanuts at home that wouldn't melt in water, so I cut up a styrofoam box that we were throwing out -- this is extremely messy, by the way), some snack size zipper-style storage bags, tape, and rubber bands, and asked them to make "water wings" for their chosen objects. They had a great time with this.
After we dried up from that, and collected some of the models to save, I brought up the idea that metal usually sinks in water but we have metal boats. Our hands-on activity was using modeling clay to make a boat. This involved handing out waxed paper for a work surface, and plenty of paper towels to blot up the water (when clay is wet it gets nasty to model). Sometimes we just threw out the clay and started with fresh. A couple of the kids were obsessed with needing to use waxed paper as part of their design to help waterproof the hull.
Some students did a great job with this, some couldn't get a floatable boat. I was in the latter category. I told them that there are mathematical equations to help with this, but we didn't delve into them. Mostly I wanted them to get the idea that they could change the volume by shaping, and thereby change the density.
Overall, an incredibly messy lesson, but very satisfying.
I would high recommend the Inquiry in Action curriculum to anyone looking for ideas for a grade school science co-op. For that matter, it would be outstanding to do at home with a single child. Annabeth and I have discussed going through either this or the ACS middle school curriculum this summer here at home. It's great stuff.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Co-op Science Week 27
Density, part 1
I think the activities in Inquiry in Action for this subject are great, but absolutely dreaded carrying them out in a carpeted second floor classroom far from any sinks. So my brilliant idea this week was to announce to the Co-op Powers That Be that we would be holding class in the kitchen.
The kitchen has a big island counter that all the kids could group around. I started by discussing what happened when you skipped stones on a pond (the stone eventually sinks) versus what happens when you throw a stick on a pond (the stick, no matter the size, tends to float). Why is that? Some of the kids answered with confidence, "Because the wood has more air in it." Which is pretty much on target.
I stuck a giant sticky note paper on the refrigerator door and wrote out that density is a function of volume and mass/weight (explaining as I went that I was going to be using the term "weight" instead of "mass" a lot of the time -- our in-home vote was that kids this age need to be aware of the difference, but we don't need to grind it down in this situation).
I filled a plastic container with water, and threw a stone in it. Then I floated a block of wood on it. I took both of them out and put them in a bucket balance to show that the wood was heavier than the rock.
Next we compared the density of the wood and rock to the density of water. To accomplish this we used displacement to come up with a volume of water equivalent to the wood -- I filled a container to the brim with water, then pushed the wood down into the container, collecting the overflow in yet another container. I poured the overflow water into a cup, which I set in the bucket balance to compare to the piece of wood. The water was heavier, of course. We repeated for the rock, although it was almost impossible to get a good displacement volume of water for the rock -- the surface tension of the water made it difficult to find the exact spot at which we could get a good displacement reading PLUS trying to get the rock-plus-container out of the outer overflow container without slopping water all over was pretty much impossible. But I think the kids got the point of how it worked. And could see that the rock was heavier than an equivalent-ish volume of water.
Bonus discussion while setting up and doing all of this -- Archimedes. I asked if anyone remembered that story, and one of the kids did, although he'd apparently forgotten about Archimedes running naked down the street yelling "Eureka!" Or perhaps his parents had left that little gem out of the discussion -- who knows.
I passed out copies of worksheet 7.2 and we went over it verbally (some of these kids still blanch when they see a worksheet, afraid of ridicule). We also cleared up the misconception that ice floats on water because it has air bubbles in it (in a way it's true, but not in the way that person was thinking).
Then, the ever-popular activity of pouring corn syrup, water, and oil into a cylinder, and seeing what happened. I used the glass jars from Frontera guacomole mix, which were perfect for this. Plus at our house we go through that stuff like it's water, so it was easy to collect several glass jars. The kids worked in groups, figuring out the order in which they'd like to pour their liquids. All liquids settled the same way, regardless. Then we tossed in pieces of dry pasta -- spaghetti and macaroni -- pieces of popsicle stick, paper clips (which tended to whack into the pasta on the way down), and broken crayon. I hadn't seen this variation of throwing in other random bits and seeing where they hovered in the liquids -- it's pretty fun. We discussed relative density. And, of course, several kids asked if they could drink the mix (they always ask that -- very predictable), and then someone asked if they could stir it up with the coffee stirrers that were on the counter. Sure, why not stir it up and see what happens.
Finally, we filled cups halfway with water, then threw in pieces of carrot, which promptly sank (during which various kids asked if they could eat the carrots, sigh ... sheesh, this gets old fast). We passed out small containers of salt and plastic spoons, and suggested trying to make the carrots float midway in the water. While working on this we discussed floating in salt water, the ocean, and the Dead Sea.
Clean up was So. Much. Easier. because we were in the kitchen. Again, I think this would've been a much more tedious lesson to plan in a classroom without a sink available. But teaching in a room set up for this type of thing made it a fun, easy lesson in density.
I think the activities in Inquiry in Action for this subject are great, but absolutely dreaded carrying them out in a carpeted second floor classroom far from any sinks. So my brilliant idea this week was to announce to the Co-op Powers That Be that we would be holding class in the kitchen.
The kitchen has a big island counter that all the kids could group around. I started by discussing what happened when you skipped stones on a pond (the stone eventually sinks) versus what happens when you throw a stick on a pond (the stick, no matter the size, tends to float). Why is that? Some of the kids answered with confidence, "Because the wood has more air in it." Which is pretty much on target.
I stuck a giant sticky note paper on the refrigerator door and wrote out that density is a function of volume and mass/weight (explaining as I went that I was going to be using the term "weight" instead of "mass" a lot of the time -- our in-home vote was that kids this age need to be aware of the difference, but we don't need to grind it down in this situation).
I filled a plastic container with water, and threw a stone in it. Then I floated a block of wood on it. I took both of them out and put them in a bucket balance to show that the wood was heavier than the rock.
Next we compared the density of the wood and rock to the density of water. To accomplish this we used displacement to come up with a volume of water equivalent to the wood -- I filled a container to the brim with water, then pushed the wood down into the container, collecting the overflow in yet another container. I poured the overflow water into a cup, which I set in the bucket balance to compare to the piece of wood. The water was heavier, of course. We repeated for the rock, although it was almost impossible to get a good displacement volume of water for the rock -- the surface tension of the water made it difficult to find the exact spot at which we could get a good displacement reading PLUS trying to get the rock-plus-container out of the outer overflow container without slopping water all over was pretty much impossible. But I think the kids got the point of how it worked. And could see that the rock was heavier than an equivalent-ish volume of water.
Bonus discussion while setting up and doing all of this -- Archimedes. I asked if anyone remembered that story, and one of the kids did, although he'd apparently forgotten about Archimedes running naked down the street yelling "Eureka!" Or perhaps his parents had left that little gem out of the discussion -- who knows.
I passed out copies of worksheet 7.2 and we went over it verbally (some of these kids still blanch when they see a worksheet, afraid of ridicule). We also cleared up the misconception that ice floats on water because it has air bubbles in it (in a way it's true, but not in the way that person was thinking).
Then, the ever-popular activity of pouring corn syrup, water, and oil into a cylinder, and seeing what happened. I used the glass jars from Frontera guacomole mix, which were perfect for this. Plus at our house we go through that stuff like it's water, so it was easy to collect several glass jars. The kids worked in groups, figuring out the order in which they'd like to pour their liquids. All liquids settled the same way, regardless. Then we tossed in pieces of dry pasta -- spaghetti and macaroni -- pieces of popsicle stick, paper clips (which tended to whack into the pasta on the way down), and broken crayon. I hadn't seen this variation of throwing in other random bits and seeing where they hovered in the liquids -- it's pretty fun. We discussed relative density. And, of course, several kids asked if they could drink the mix (they always ask that -- very predictable), and then someone asked if they could stir it up with the coffee stirrers that were on the counter. Sure, why not stir it up and see what happens.
Finally, we filled cups halfway with water, then threw in pieces of carrot, which promptly sank (during which various kids asked if they could eat the carrots, sigh ... sheesh, this gets old fast). We passed out small containers of salt and plastic spoons, and suggested trying to make the carrots float midway in the water. While working on this we discussed floating in salt water, the ocean, and the Dead Sea.
Clean up was So. Much. Easier. because we were in the kitchen. Again, I think this would've been a much more tedious lesson to plan in a classroom without a sink available. But teaching in a room set up for this type of thing made it a fun, easy lesson in density.
Friday, April 6, 2012
Co-op Science Week 26
Week 25 ended up not happening as a science class -- a couple of people wanted to test a 4th and 5th grade VBS curriculum they were writing, and asked if they could use one of our co-op's class periods for that. Since science is the biggest group of 4th and 5th graders we had them use that class hour for their field testing.
On week 26, then, we took a look at states of matter. I really diverged from the Inquiry in Action curriculum that we've been using this week. Part of the reason was that I just couldn't face an hour of making condensation appear on glasses. Another part was that Easter is approaching, so I decided to come up with a couple of Easter-centric demonstrations.
We began the class by discussing the states of matter, particularly solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. I mentioned that there are lots of others such as Einstein-Bose condensate, but that by the time they would need to know those (say, college) there would probably be even more, so don't worry about them now.
We discussed how the molecules become more energized and further apart in solid, liquid, and gas. I did the demonstration in the curriculum of using a glass of cold water and a glass of hot water to show the rate of mixing for a drop of food coloring -- the hot water molecules seemed to be moving around more quickly since the food coloring mixed in hot water much more quickly.
We also discussed how water moves from solid to liquid to gas (melting, evaporation) and from gas to liquid to solid (condensation, freezing). I also explained sublimation and deposition, and gave example of each -- ice cube in the freezer becoming smaller, frost forming. The kids then kept going off on tangents about dry ice, which is an excellent example of sublimation, but, yoohoo, IS NOT ICE MADE FROM WATER (so, for example, saying that the ice in your freezer was so cold that it was "dry ice" is incorrect ... unless your freezer is somehow putting carbon dioxide under enough pressure to liquify it and then freeze it.
Anyway, forward with the lesson, after yet more digressions to discuss ice on lakes in northern states (yes, you can drive on it). To show how gas contracts when it cools, and also demonstrate a handy use for all of those hardboiled eggs leftover from dying Easter eggs, we did the ever popular egg in a bottle trick. A couple of the kids had seen it before. I used a glass bottle from Santa Cruz juice -- I'd taken in 2 bottles and 2 eggs in case we had a flop the first time.
And to show how gas expands when heated, what could be better than blowing up Peeps in the microwave? This was accompanied by much discussion of the relative likability of Peeps, including some among us who've never tried them. The leftover Peeps were handed out to those who wanted to eat one, which turned out to be a really small segment of the class. By the way, although the church that hosts our co-op meetings has a couple of microwaves in their kitchen, I opted to take in a small, cheap microwave we have in the basement so I could use it in our classroom rather than trooping down to the kitchen.
Finally, thus far we'd been talking about changes in states of matter due to temperature change. Matter also changes due to change in pressure. As a reminder of the change in pressure, I also brought in everything needed to make Oobleck -- cornstarch and water. Oobleck, of course, seems solid when pressure is applied, and liquid when it isn't under pressure. To make Oobleck for 14 kids without making a gigantic mess, I put a 1/2 cup of cornstarch in small ziploc-type bag2 (one for each child). Each child then got a plastic cup and a plastic spoon. I had water in plastic bottles. The kids dumped their cornstarch into the plastic cup, and my assistant and I added about 3 tablespoons (plus a bit) of water to each cup. The kids then stirred with spoons, and used their hands to mix it up. We also had pitchers of water and paper towels on hand for clean ups. And, most importantly, we had all gone outside before we started this particular adventure, so cleaning up spills consisted of dumping water on the sidewalk.
The entire lesson took less than our hour classtime, so the rest of the hour was spent enjoying the incredible weather -- sunny and in the 80s at the beginning of April.
On week 26, then, we took a look at states of matter. I really diverged from the Inquiry in Action curriculum that we've been using this week. Part of the reason was that I just couldn't face an hour of making condensation appear on glasses. Another part was that Easter is approaching, so I decided to come up with a couple of Easter-centric demonstrations.
We began the class by discussing the states of matter, particularly solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. I mentioned that there are lots of others such as Einstein-Bose condensate, but that by the time they would need to know those (say, college) there would probably be even more, so don't worry about them now.
We discussed how the molecules become more energized and further apart in solid, liquid, and gas. I did the demonstration in the curriculum of using a glass of cold water and a glass of hot water to show the rate of mixing for a drop of food coloring -- the hot water molecules seemed to be moving around more quickly since the food coloring mixed in hot water much more quickly.
We also discussed how water moves from solid to liquid to gas (melting, evaporation) and from gas to liquid to solid (condensation, freezing). I also explained sublimation and deposition, and gave example of each -- ice cube in the freezer becoming smaller, frost forming. The kids then kept going off on tangents about dry ice, which is an excellent example of sublimation, but, yoohoo, IS NOT ICE MADE FROM WATER (so, for example, saying that the ice in your freezer was so cold that it was "dry ice" is incorrect ... unless your freezer is somehow putting carbon dioxide under enough pressure to liquify it and then freeze it.
Anyway, forward with the lesson, after yet more digressions to discuss ice on lakes in northern states (yes, you can drive on it). To show how gas contracts when it cools, and also demonstrate a handy use for all of those hardboiled eggs leftover from dying Easter eggs, we did the ever popular egg in a bottle trick. A couple of the kids had seen it before. I used a glass bottle from Santa Cruz juice -- I'd taken in 2 bottles and 2 eggs in case we had a flop the first time.
And to show how gas expands when heated, what could be better than blowing up Peeps in the microwave? This was accompanied by much discussion of the relative likability of Peeps, including some among us who've never tried them. The leftover Peeps were handed out to those who wanted to eat one, which turned out to be a really small segment of the class. By the way, although the church that hosts our co-op meetings has a couple of microwaves in their kitchen, I opted to take in a small, cheap microwave we have in the basement so I could use it in our classroom rather than trooping down to the kitchen.
Finally, thus far we'd been talking about changes in states of matter due to temperature change. Matter also changes due to change in pressure. As a reminder of the change in pressure, I also brought in everything needed to make Oobleck -- cornstarch and water. Oobleck, of course, seems solid when pressure is applied, and liquid when it isn't under pressure. To make Oobleck for 14 kids without making a gigantic mess, I put a 1/2 cup of cornstarch in small ziploc-type bag2 (one for each child). Each child then got a plastic cup and a plastic spoon. I had water in plastic bottles. The kids dumped their cornstarch into the plastic cup, and my assistant and I added about 3 tablespoons (plus a bit) of water to each cup. The kids then stirred with spoons, and used their hands to mix it up. We also had pitchers of water and paper towels on hand for clean ups. And, most importantly, we had all gone outside before we started this particular adventure, so cleaning up spills consisted of dumping water on the sidewalk.
The entire lesson took less than our hour classtime, so the rest of the hour was spent enjoying the incredible weather -- sunny and in the 80s at the beginning of April.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Co-op Science Week 24
Inquiry in Action chapter 5, part 2 -- Formation of a precipitate, and neutralizing acids and bases.
We started out with a review of what we covered the week before -- that chemical changes can cause a gas to be released, a color to change, or a heating or cooling to occur. Then we worked on another possibility -- forming a precipitate.
Honestly, as I read through the lesson I thought this sounded like a massive PITA to do -- making hard water, then making soap scum. I thought it would be easier to do something like throw vinegar in milk to make curds ... but then we got into all sorts of discussions (at home) as to whether that would actually be a precipitate or a coagulate ... and then started discussing flocculation ... and never really reached a conclusion. (Side note: Rick is a chemical engineer, and tends to think discussing chemical reactions is quite scintillating.) Although it did occur to me that vinegar plus milk had a high probability of making a really stinky mess in the classroom, especially if it spilled in the carpet. So we went with the soap scum.
And, really, it turned out not to be that hard to do if you just follow the directions. I tried it all out the night before, as I usually do. The kids worked in groups, mixing epsom salts with water to make hard water, shredding up Ivory soap to m ix with the water (they sort of went wild with this part, even though I demonstrated it first, and even though we had an adult working with each group).
They were quite fascinated with the concept of pouring the soapy scummy water through a coffee filter -- most had never considered the possibility of using a coffee filter as a filter. I asked if anyone made yogurt cheese at home, since it sort of reminded me of that. I knew one family did that sort of thing (one of the adult helpers and her kids, as a matter of fact).
The kids were excellent at harvesting their soap scum off the filter, even the group that had knocked over their cup of soapy scummy water and ended up without much to use. They were really awful about putting a similar amount of soap flakes in the other cup of water -- we've gone over this concept Every. Single. Week. of controlling amounts so we only have one variable. But I guess the excitement of mucking about with the soft Ivory soap and popsicle sticks was too much for them.
They were absolute champions about making soap bubbles with a straw. Well, those with the actual soapy water -- the soap scum water was pretty disappointing.
Then we set all of THAT aside (rather regretfully, as there were those among us that thought they should play with globs of soap the rest of the day) to work some more with pH.
I had made new red cabbage indicator -- it doesn't really keep its indicator qualities if it's hanging around for a week. Plus at this point I can pretty much whip up a batch in less than 5 minutes.
The previous week one of the girls asked if we could get the color of the indicator back to the original if we mixed together the cup of indicator-plus-cream-of-tartar and the cup of indicator-plus-detergent. I had slopped them together, but it didn't work.
This week each group used a control cup, so they could see the color they were trying to get back to, and 2 other cups. They carefully added small amounts of cream of tartar and detergent powder to each. Two notes on process:
First of all, the curriculum specifies using flat toothpicks to add the powders to the indicator. I didn't have any flat toothpicks, and didn't really feel like driving around town looking for them. Instead, I cut plastic drinking straws into segments about 1.5 inches long, then split the segment lengthwise to make a little scoop. One straw gives you several scoops that are very thin (so it can get under the powder to scoop it up) and fairly spill-proof (due to the curve of the straw sides).
Secondly, when I tried this at home I originally tried using Ivory Snow laundry detergent powder. I kept dumping it in and dumping it in, trying to get the indicator to change color. It occurred to me that perhaps Ivory is mild because its pH is fairly neutral. So I switched to a small box of Sun detergent which was the cheapest thing Walmart had. Wowza, a tiny bit of that stuff made a HUGE difference in indicator color. Brand of detergent really makes a difference in how this works! And could be an interesting inquiry all on its own -- maybe a science fair project. (Of course, now I've no clue what to do with the rest of the box of this detergent, but that's another issue.)
In any case, the groups of kids successfully turned their indicators various colors, then switched around and turned them back to the original color. One group overshot it, and went to far the OTHER way. Which was actually a good experience, because then we just added a scoochy bit more of the first powder.
Afterwards everyone mixed everything together as desired, which is always one of the more popular moments of the class.
We started out with a review of what we covered the week before -- that chemical changes can cause a gas to be released, a color to change, or a heating or cooling to occur. Then we worked on another possibility -- forming a precipitate.
Honestly, as I read through the lesson I thought this sounded like a massive PITA to do -- making hard water, then making soap scum. I thought it would be easier to do something like throw vinegar in milk to make curds ... but then we got into all sorts of discussions (at home) as to whether that would actually be a precipitate or a coagulate ... and then started discussing flocculation ... and never really reached a conclusion. (Side note: Rick is a chemical engineer, and tends to think discussing chemical reactions is quite scintillating.) Although it did occur to me that vinegar plus milk had a high probability of making a really stinky mess in the classroom, especially if it spilled in the carpet. So we went with the soap scum.
And, really, it turned out not to be that hard to do if you just follow the directions. I tried it all out the night before, as I usually do. The kids worked in groups, mixing epsom salts with water to make hard water, shredding up Ivory soap to m ix with the water (they sort of went wild with this part, even though I demonstrated it first, and even though we had an adult working with each group).
They were quite fascinated with the concept of pouring the soapy scummy water through a coffee filter -- most had never considered the possibility of using a coffee filter as a filter. I asked if anyone made yogurt cheese at home, since it sort of reminded me of that. I knew one family did that sort of thing (one of the adult helpers and her kids, as a matter of fact).
The kids were excellent at harvesting their soap scum off the filter, even the group that had knocked over their cup of soapy scummy water and ended up without much to use. They were really awful about putting a similar amount of soap flakes in the other cup of water -- we've gone over this concept Every. Single. Week. of controlling amounts so we only have one variable. But I guess the excitement of mucking about with the soft Ivory soap and popsicle sticks was too much for them.
They were absolute champions about making soap bubbles with a straw. Well, those with the actual soapy water -- the soap scum water was pretty disappointing.
Then we set all of THAT aside (rather regretfully, as there were those among us that thought they should play with globs of soap the rest of the day) to work some more with pH.
I had made new red cabbage indicator -- it doesn't really keep its indicator qualities if it's hanging around for a week. Plus at this point I can pretty much whip up a batch in less than 5 minutes.
The previous week one of the girls asked if we could get the color of the indicator back to the original if we mixed together the cup of indicator-plus-cream-of-tartar and the cup of indicator-plus-detergent. I had slopped them together, but it didn't work.
This week each group used a control cup, so they could see the color they were trying to get back to, and 2 other cups. They carefully added small amounts of cream of tartar and detergent powder to each. Two notes on process:
First of all, the curriculum specifies using flat toothpicks to add the powders to the indicator. I didn't have any flat toothpicks, and didn't really feel like driving around town looking for them. Instead, I cut plastic drinking straws into segments about 1.5 inches long, then split the segment lengthwise to make a little scoop. One straw gives you several scoops that are very thin (so it can get under the powder to scoop it up) and fairly spill-proof (due to the curve of the straw sides).
Secondly, when I tried this at home I originally tried using Ivory Snow laundry detergent powder. I kept dumping it in and dumping it in, trying to get the indicator to change color. It occurred to me that perhaps Ivory is mild because its pH is fairly neutral. So I switched to a small box of Sun detergent which was the cheapest thing Walmart had. Wowza, a tiny bit of that stuff made a HUGE difference in indicator color. Brand of detergent really makes a difference in how this works! And could be an interesting inquiry all on its own -- maybe a science fair project. (Of course, now I've no clue what to do with the rest of the box of this detergent, but that's another issue.)
In any case, the groups of kids successfully turned their indicators various colors, then switched around and turned them back to the original color. One group overshot it, and went to far the OTHER way. Which was actually a good experience, because then we just added a scoochy bit more of the first powder.
Afterwards everyone mixed everything together as desired, which is always one of the more popular moments of the class.
Co-op Science Week 23
Inquiry in Action Chapter 5, Chemical Change.
Wow, I was SO EXCITED about this week's lesson.
We started off by discussing the difference between a chemical change and a physical change. I gave examples of each (eg, cutting up a piece of steel wool vs. spritzing it with water and letting it rust), and also wrote out a couple of examples on the board (methane plus oxygen becomes carbon dioxide plus water).
Then, the FUN stuff. We looked at a couple of plain white powders -- baking soda and baking powder. They look pretty much the same, but when we added vinegar they reacted somewhat differently. We discussed that CO2 had been created during the reaction, and that the reaction rate had been different for the 2 powders.
Next I put some red cabbage indicator, which I made using the same process we'd used here, in a couple of clear plastic cups. (The curriculum has a different way of making the indicator, but I thought the idea of giving out ziplocs, water, and cabbage to the kids was downright scary -- I had visions of this stuff being blasted everywhere.) I put a little cream of tartar (an acid) in one, and a little powdered detergent (a base) in the other. Of course, they turned 2 different colors. Only one of the students had ever messed around with this sort of thing before -- not a huge surprise, since cabbage gets rather stinky, and most parents don't care to mess with it (although it's so cheap, easy, and fun that they should).
Okay, now we've seen a couple of ways to tell rather anonymous-looking white powders apart -- looking for chemical changes that produce gas, and looking for chemical changes that cause color change. So we set about sorting out what would happen when we tested baking soda, baking powder, cream of tartar, corn starch, and detergent with drops of various liquids -- vinegar, water, iodine (turns from red to black when it combines with starch -- this was another activity practically straight out of the old Junior Girl Scout badge book from back when GSUSA cared about getting girls interested in STEM, and also the reason I had iodine around the house), and red cabbage indicator. The kids worked in groups of 4. They also had an unknown (baking powder) to identify.
It was really tough to keep this organized and on track -- you practically need an adult with each group of kids, helping them figure out how to organize their work. But it was really fascinating stuff. I'd say that over the course of prepping for this activity I learned more about the history of cream of tartar and of baking powder than I ever thought I would.
After the extravaganza of testing all of those powders we were running a bit short on time, but we still tried to cram in the last to demonstrations I'd chosen (I'm starting to leave stuff out of the curriculum). First I poured some vinegar in a graduated cylinder and had the kids note the temperature of it with a partial immersion thermometer (both the cylinders and the thermometers were purchased from Home Science Tools). Then I added baking soda, let it bubble up all over the place (always a crowd pleaser), then looked again at the temperature. It had dropped! An endothermic reaction.
The curriculum suggests using calcium chloride for the "other" reaction, but I decided to go with the easier-to-source hydrogen peroxide and yeast reaction. This time we put the yeast in the graduated cylinder first, measured the temperature of the peroxide while it was still in the bottle, then dumped it into the cylinder. It bubbled up, of course, and the temperature shot up. Exothermic!
So we managed to make it through 3 possible outcomes of chemical changes -- a gas formed, a change in color, and a change in temperature. It was an action-packed hour.
Wow, I was SO EXCITED about this week's lesson.
We started off by discussing the difference between a chemical change and a physical change. I gave examples of each (eg, cutting up a piece of steel wool vs. spritzing it with water and letting it rust), and also wrote out a couple of examples on the board (methane plus oxygen becomes carbon dioxide plus water).
Then, the FUN stuff. We looked at a couple of plain white powders -- baking soda and baking powder. They look pretty much the same, but when we added vinegar they reacted somewhat differently. We discussed that CO2 had been created during the reaction, and that the reaction rate had been different for the 2 powders.
Next I put some red cabbage indicator, which I made using the same process we'd used here, in a couple of clear plastic cups. (The curriculum has a different way of making the indicator, but I thought the idea of giving out ziplocs, water, and cabbage to the kids was downright scary -- I had visions of this stuff being blasted everywhere.) I put a little cream of tartar (an acid) in one, and a little powdered detergent (a base) in the other. Of course, they turned 2 different colors. Only one of the students had ever messed around with this sort of thing before -- not a huge surprise, since cabbage gets rather stinky, and most parents don't care to mess with it (although it's so cheap, easy, and fun that they should).
Okay, now we've seen a couple of ways to tell rather anonymous-looking white powders apart -- looking for chemical changes that produce gas, and looking for chemical changes that cause color change. So we set about sorting out what would happen when we tested baking soda, baking powder, cream of tartar, corn starch, and detergent with drops of various liquids -- vinegar, water, iodine (turns from red to black when it combines with starch -- this was another activity practically straight out of the old Junior Girl Scout badge book from back when GSUSA cared about getting girls interested in STEM, and also the reason I had iodine around the house), and red cabbage indicator. The kids worked in groups of 4. They also had an unknown (baking powder) to identify.
It was really tough to keep this organized and on track -- you practically need an adult with each group of kids, helping them figure out how to organize their work. But it was really fascinating stuff. I'd say that over the course of prepping for this activity I learned more about the history of cream of tartar and of baking powder than I ever thought I would.
After the extravaganza of testing all of those powders we were running a bit short on time, but we still tried to cram in the last to demonstrations I'd chosen (I'm starting to leave stuff out of the curriculum). First I poured some vinegar in a graduated cylinder and had the kids note the temperature of it with a partial immersion thermometer (both the cylinders and the thermometers were purchased from Home Science Tools). Then I added baking soda, let it bubble up all over the place (always a crowd pleaser), then looked again at the temperature. It had dropped! An endothermic reaction.
The curriculum suggests using calcium chloride for the "other" reaction, but I decided to go with the easier-to-source hydrogen peroxide and yeast reaction. This time we put the yeast in the graduated cylinder first, measured the temperature of the peroxide while it was still in the bottle, then dumped it into the cylinder. It bubbled up, of course, and the temperature shot up. Exothermic!
So we managed to make it through 3 possible outcomes of chemical changes -- a gas formed, a change in color, and a change in temperature. It was an action-packed hour.
Co-op Science Week 22
Inquiry in Action Chapter 4 part 2 -- Dissolving gases.
Exciting thing number 1 for this week -- both my adult helpers let me know at the last minute that they couldn't be there. As it turned out, though, Annabeth's science class was cancelled, so she came in to help me. Also, I managed to coerce another adult to stop by for about half an hour for crowd control.
To look at how gases dissolve in liquids we messed around quite a bit with carbonated water. Which fizzed all over the place when opened. We had towels on hand, though, which is something I'd highly recommend for most of this course.
We poured carbonated water in plastic cups, then dumped in various things and watched what happened -- granulated sugar, M&Ms, pipe cleaners. I think the pipe cleaners were supposed to bobble up and down like raisins or lemon seeds (oddly, no one in the class has ever put either raisins or lemon seeds in a carbonated beverage before).
We also put carbonated water in glasses, then put those glasses into other containers of cold water and hot water so we could observe whether they de-fizzed more quickly in one than the other. I had taken the hot water in Thermos containers (which I then left closed the rest of the day, including one that was still full of water, thus making a dandy home experiment on what happens when the water cools down and you try to unscrew the top).
For our finale, we tried to figure out a good way to make a carbonated beverage that had lemon juice and sugar added. We brainstormed as a class to figure out how to get both ingredients in the carbonated water without having much of the fizz leave -- the problem being that when we add granulated sugar we lose carbonation. I did numerous tests of theories the kids had of what to add when. One of the students sorta gave the answer -- mix the lemon juice and sugar together first, then pour them in together -- so groups of kids made their own batch using this methodology. Many kids wanted to taste it, which wasn't particularly surprising -- I had taken little Dixie cups along for that purpose.
The kids then wrote up a booklet about their experience. These will be displayed on our table at our final Open House of the year.
The remainder of the time was spent trying to get all the stickiness off the tables, as this ended up being much messier in a crowd than at home.
Exciting thing number 1 for this week -- both my adult helpers let me know at the last minute that they couldn't be there. As it turned out, though, Annabeth's science class was cancelled, so she came in to help me. Also, I managed to coerce another adult to stop by for about half an hour for crowd control.
To look at how gases dissolve in liquids we messed around quite a bit with carbonated water. Which fizzed all over the place when opened. We had towels on hand, though, which is something I'd highly recommend for most of this course.
We poured carbonated water in plastic cups, then dumped in various things and watched what happened -- granulated sugar, M&Ms, pipe cleaners. I think the pipe cleaners were supposed to bobble up and down like raisins or lemon seeds (oddly, no one in the class has ever put either raisins or lemon seeds in a carbonated beverage before).
We also put carbonated water in glasses, then put those glasses into other containers of cold water and hot water so we could observe whether they de-fizzed more quickly in one than the other. I had taken the hot water in Thermos containers (which I then left closed the rest of the day, including one that was still full of water, thus making a dandy home experiment on what happens when the water cools down and you try to unscrew the top).
For our finale, we tried to figure out a good way to make a carbonated beverage that had lemon juice and sugar added. We brainstormed as a class to figure out how to get both ingredients in the carbonated water without having much of the fizz leave -- the problem being that when we add granulated sugar we lose carbonation. I did numerous tests of theories the kids had of what to add when. One of the students sorta gave the answer -- mix the lemon juice and sugar together first, then pour them in together -- so groups of kids made their own batch using this methodology. Many kids wanted to taste it, which wasn't particularly surprising -- I had taken little Dixie cups along for that purpose.
The kids then wrote up a booklet about their experience. These will be displayed on our table at our final Open House of the year.
The remainder of the time was spent trying to get all the stickiness off the tables, as this ended up being much messier in a crowd than at home.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Co-op Science Week 21
Inquiry in Action chapter 4 -- Dissolving Solids and Liquids (we'll get to gases next week)
Activity 1 is to simply dissolve sugar and food coloring in water and in vegetable oil. I did this as a class demo -- had some of the kids do it while everyone watched. Then we discussed how we define dissolving.
Rick thought I should also talk about emulsions by mixing oil and water together. I thought this might be confusing (I mean, there's a reason the ACS didn't include it in this chapter, right?) but then I decided what the heck -- I dumped some water plus food coloring in a bottle, followed by some vegetable oil. Shook the whole thing up while talking about it, babbling away about emulsifiers, how lecithin in egg yolk acts as an emulsifier and hence we can make mayonnaise, blah blah blah . The kids were FASCINATED. They acted like they'd never seen this sort of thing before. I kept asking, "Haven't you ever made salad dressing?" They demanded we pass around the bottle so they could look at it. I put in a couple of drops of Dawn dish detergent to show how it would change our mixture -- again, they acted like they'd never seen anything like this before. All in all, a very eye-opening experience for me.
Next we made colored sugar. I had them pair up, and handed out ziplocks with pre-measured tablespoons of sugar. The adults went around the class and put a drop of food coloring in the bag, which the kids then shook up (I had tried this at home to make sure it worked). Bonus math lesson -- how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon? Three! Each pair then got 3 plastic cups already labelled for oil, water, and alcohol, plus popsicle sticks (purchased at the Dollar Store, by the way). Adults measured out the liquids, and we also helped them measure the teaspoonfuls of colored sugar into each cup. The latter was done mostly to speed things up since we didn't have enough teaspoons for every pair to have their own.
Next we skipped ahead to activity 4, dissolving liquids in water. Again the kids worked in pairs, and were handed 3 plastic cups which had already been marked for oil, alcohol, and corn syrup. The kids filled the cups partway with water (we have access to pitchers which we can fill at sinks). Adults handed out small Dixie cups with the required alcohol, oil, and corn syrup (note: when measuring out the corn syrup it helps if you put a bit of oil on the tablespoon first).
The kids were amazingly intrigued by this activity. One boy who typically has very little attention span was excited by the way the alcohol dissolved in the water -- "It looks like veins!" Last week we had combined drops of alcohol and water, then discussed that the refraction rates caused the jiggly effect, so it was interesting that he was so excited about this. The BIG news, though, was what happens when you put a tablespoon of oil in a cup of water. It sinks to the bottom, then bounces back up ... then coalesced into a giant blob of oil on the top ... which you could sort of blop around by squeezing the cup. It was as though no one had ever sat around playing with oil and water before (when my kids were little I put oil and colored water in old plastic water bottles and let them play with it -- either these kids never did that, or they were so bored by not having much to look at in the classroom that they really paid attention for the first time).
I had taken coffee filters, washable markers, and Sharpies for a follow-up activity, planning to show how you can make designs depending on whether you use water or alcohol to dissolve the markers (you can also do faux tie-dye with Sharpies and alcohol on cotton tshirts). But we ran out of time, so I just mentioned it as a possible follow up at home.
Overall, I thought this was a sort of blah lesson. But the kids worked well together on it, so it was good from that standpoint.
Activity 1 is to simply dissolve sugar and food coloring in water and in vegetable oil. I did this as a class demo -- had some of the kids do it while everyone watched. Then we discussed how we define dissolving.
Rick thought I should also talk about emulsions by mixing oil and water together. I thought this might be confusing (I mean, there's a reason the ACS didn't include it in this chapter, right?) but then I decided what the heck -- I dumped some water plus food coloring in a bottle, followed by some vegetable oil. Shook the whole thing up while talking about it, babbling away about emulsifiers, how lecithin in egg yolk acts as an emulsifier and hence we can make mayonnaise, blah blah blah . The kids were FASCINATED. They acted like they'd never seen this sort of thing before. I kept asking, "Haven't you ever made salad dressing?" They demanded we pass around the bottle so they could look at it. I put in a couple of drops of Dawn dish detergent to show how it would change our mixture -- again, they acted like they'd never seen anything like this before. All in all, a very eye-opening experience for me.
Next we made colored sugar. I had them pair up, and handed out ziplocks with pre-measured tablespoons of sugar. The adults went around the class and put a drop of food coloring in the bag, which the kids then shook up (I had tried this at home to make sure it worked). Bonus math lesson -- how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon? Three! Each pair then got 3 plastic cups already labelled for oil, water, and alcohol, plus popsicle sticks (purchased at the Dollar Store, by the way). Adults measured out the liquids, and we also helped them measure the teaspoonfuls of colored sugar into each cup. The latter was done mostly to speed things up since we didn't have enough teaspoons for every pair to have their own.
Next we skipped ahead to activity 4, dissolving liquids in water. Again the kids worked in pairs, and were handed 3 plastic cups which had already been marked for oil, alcohol, and corn syrup. The kids filled the cups partway with water (we have access to pitchers which we can fill at sinks). Adults handed out small Dixie cups with the required alcohol, oil, and corn syrup (note: when measuring out the corn syrup it helps if you put a bit of oil on the tablespoon first).
The kids were amazingly intrigued by this activity. One boy who typically has very little attention span was excited by the way the alcohol dissolved in the water -- "It looks like veins!" Last week we had combined drops of alcohol and water, then discussed that the refraction rates caused the jiggly effect, so it was interesting that he was so excited about this. The BIG news, though, was what happens when you put a tablespoon of oil in a cup of water. It sinks to the bottom, then bounces back up ... then coalesced into a giant blob of oil on the top ... which you could sort of blop around by squeezing the cup. It was as though no one had ever sat around playing with oil and water before (when my kids were little I put oil and colored water in old plastic water bottles and let them play with it -- either these kids never did that, or they were so bored by not having much to look at in the classroom that they really paid attention for the first time).
I had taken coffee filters, washable markers, and Sharpies for a follow-up activity, planning to show how you can make designs depending on whether you use water or alcohol to dissolve the markers (you can also do faux tie-dye with Sharpies and alcohol on cotton tshirts). But we ran out of time, so I just mentioned it as a possible follow up at home.
Overall, I thought this was a sort of blah lesson. But the kids worked well together on it, so it was good from that standpoint.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Co-op Science Week 20
Continuing Chapter 3 of Inquiry in Action
This week we tried Using Color to See How Liquids Combine, and Using the Combining Test to Identify Unknown Liquids. I thought theses were pretty fun experiments when I did them at home beforehand.
To combine the liquids in an orderly fashion, I printed out the templates provided onto cardstock. The directions suggest laminating them or putting them in a plastic bag. I don't own a laminator, but was fairly certain the plastic bag concept would drive me nuts because the plastic would slip around the cardstock. I considered using wide clear packing tape, which I'm pretty sure would work well to stick over the parts of the template that need to be waterproof. But I found some Xyron Glossy Laminate Sheets (which are sort of like 9 inch by 12 inch sheets of transparent Contact paper) at JoAnn, and used my 40-percent-off coupon on that. You can also laminate at a place like FedEx/Kinko's, although that would've cost more than what I spent on my Xyron sheets.
After that, it was a matter of mixing up the appropriate batches of detergent water, salt water, isopropyl alcohol, and plain water with some food coloring. I put these in my little Solo condiment containers (purchased last week at Walmart), and used my eyedroppers from last week.
The idea of the experiment is that you eyedropper blue-colored water onto one circle on the template, then eyedropper yellow liquid onto the other circle nearby. A toothpick is used to "herd" the one drop towards the other. Once they touch, you observe what happens.
And let me tell you, I found what happened amazingly cool. Okay, the water and detergent water weren't all that amazing -- I could picture what was going to happen. But the yellow salt water plus blue water? They suddenly smacked together like neodymium magnets, forming a green droplet ... but that droplet had a funky striated appearance when you looked from the side. So I used the eyedropper to gently suck the top off the drop ... and SUCKED THE BLUE RIGHT OFF THE DROP! Yes, the plain water stays on top, and doesn't actually mix with the salt water (Rick, Mr. ChemE, found this an exciting proof of the strength of the bond between NaCL and H2O; I just thought it was a cool thing to mess with, like a magic trick).
Then the blue water plus the yellow alcohol met ... and started to shimmer and shake like green jello. Very cool. That has to do with the refraction of the light passing through the air vs. water vs. alcohol, a concept we covered last semester during our physics portion of class.
So, to do this in a co-op class, here are some tips:
First of all, it really really helps to have an adult (or older student) per group of kids. This is tricky business -- they're having to eyedropper liquids onto circles (and keep paper towels nearby so if they mess up they can just wipe off the laminated cards and start over) and then gently move the drops together without actually using the toothpicks to stir the 2 liquids (which sometimes happened by accident). Also, not to be sexist, but a lot of time girls this age have steadier fine motor skills than boys, so it's nice to have mixed groups.
I transported all of my liquids to the class via old plastic water bottles, which I labelled with Sharpie. You'll need enough for knowns and unknowns. We just capped up the condiment containers and threw them in the trash when we were done. I wonder if I should've taken them home to wash out -- we might need more of them for later experiments.
We instructed the kids to lay their eyedroppers on paper towels when not in use. For the most part they managed to do this, which cut down on some of the spills.
And, yes, you'll need 9 eyedroppers or pipettes per group do conduct these 2 experiments.
Some of the kids caught on to the value of replicating experiments -- it was really cool to see them working these things out. They're learning a lot about how science is "done" by working through this curriculum. Overall, some of the kids are absolutely loving this, and others don't seem to be terribly engaged; I'm pretty sure this is normal.
The 2 experiments took about 45 to 50 minutes of our hour long class. The groups work at amazingly different rates, with varying amounts of arguing about how they should proceed and who gets to do what. In the future I'm going to have some other related demos or activities to fill in the rest of the time.
This week we tried Using Color to See How Liquids Combine, and Using the Combining Test to Identify Unknown Liquids. I thought theses were pretty fun experiments when I did them at home beforehand.
To combine the liquids in an orderly fashion, I printed out the templates provided onto cardstock. The directions suggest laminating them or putting them in a plastic bag. I don't own a laminator, but was fairly certain the plastic bag concept would drive me nuts because the plastic would slip around the cardstock. I considered using wide clear packing tape, which I'm pretty sure would work well to stick over the parts of the template that need to be waterproof. But I found some Xyron Glossy Laminate Sheets (which are sort of like 9 inch by 12 inch sheets of transparent Contact paper) at JoAnn, and used my 40-percent-off coupon on that. You can also laminate at a place like FedEx/Kinko's, although that would've cost more than what I spent on my Xyron sheets.
After that, it was a matter of mixing up the appropriate batches of detergent water, salt water, isopropyl alcohol, and plain water with some food coloring. I put these in my little Solo condiment containers (purchased last week at Walmart), and used my eyedroppers from last week.
The idea of the experiment is that you eyedropper blue-colored water onto one circle on the template, then eyedropper yellow liquid onto the other circle nearby. A toothpick is used to "herd" the one drop towards the other. Once they touch, you observe what happens.
And let me tell you, I found what happened amazingly cool. Okay, the water and detergent water weren't all that amazing -- I could picture what was going to happen. But the yellow salt water plus blue water? They suddenly smacked together like neodymium magnets, forming a green droplet ... but that droplet had a funky striated appearance when you looked from the side. So I used the eyedropper to gently suck the top off the drop ... and SUCKED THE BLUE RIGHT OFF THE DROP! Yes, the plain water stays on top, and doesn't actually mix with the salt water (Rick, Mr. ChemE, found this an exciting proof of the strength of the bond between NaCL and H2O; I just thought it was a cool thing to mess with, like a magic trick).
Then the blue water plus the yellow alcohol met ... and started to shimmer and shake like green jello. Very cool. That has to do with the refraction of the light passing through the air vs. water vs. alcohol, a concept we covered last semester during our physics portion of class.
So, to do this in a co-op class, here are some tips:
First of all, it really really helps to have an adult (or older student) per group of kids. This is tricky business -- they're having to eyedropper liquids onto circles (and keep paper towels nearby so if they mess up they can just wipe off the laminated cards and start over) and then gently move the drops together without actually using the toothpicks to stir the 2 liquids (which sometimes happened by accident). Also, not to be sexist, but a lot of time girls this age have steadier fine motor skills than boys, so it's nice to have mixed groups.
I transported all of my liquids to the class via old plastic water bottles, which I labelled with Sharpie. You'll need enough for knowns and unknowns. We just capped up the condiment containers and threw them in the trash when we were done. I wonder if I should've taken them home to wash out -- we might need more of them for later experiments.
We instructed the kids to lay their eyedroppers on paper towels when not in use. For the most part they managed to do this, which cut down on some of the spills.
And, yes, you'll need 9 eyedroppers or pipettes per group do conduct these 2 experiments.
Some of the kids caught on to the value of replicating experiments -- it was really cool to see them working these things out. They're learning a lot about how science is "done" by working through this curriculum. Overall, some of the kids are absolutely loving this, and others don't seem to be terribly engaged; I'm pretty sure this is normal.
The 2 experiments took about 45 to 50 minutes of our hour long class. The groups work at amazingly different rates, with varying amounts of arguing about how they should proceed and who gets to do what. In the future I'm going to have some other related demos or activities to fill in the rest of the time.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Co-op Science Week 19
Chapter 3 of Inquiry in Action
We started class by taking a look at the polarity of water. I had them tell me the chemical formula (H2O) so we could continue to review the names of atoms. I drew a picture of the molecule on the board, then had everyone gather in a tight group in the middle of the room (a couple of kids weren't comfortable with being in a big group like this, so they simply watched). I explained that everyone's right hand was positive and everyone's left hand was negative; all of our right hands wanted to touch everyone else's left hands, and vice versa. That was my simple explanation of surface tension -- the water all wants to stay together that way (homeschool kids often don't get a chance to do group things like this, having to rely on imagination). Now, if we all moved over to the wall and decided we all wanted our hands to touch the wall as much as we wanted them to touch each other, that would be like water soaking into paper. And if someone gave us a bunch of red and blue balls, and we all wanted a red ball in our left hand and a blue ball in our right hand, that would be like dissolving NaCl in water (plus, bonus, we would be so involved with the red and blue balls that if we were next to the wall we wouldn't be quite so interested in touching it with our hands).
Then we started the Look-Alike Liquids activities. We divided the class into 3 groups -- 4 students, 4 students, and 5 students (1 girl was home sick). I had an extra adult helper, so that was really handy. We passed out the labelled eyedroppers. Each group needed a total of 5 eyedroppers for the day's experiments. WHERE TO FIND THAT MANY EYEDROPPERS: Our co-op had 10 eyedroppers already. Discount School Supply has them fairly cheap online, although you'll have to pay shipping. Dick Blick also has a decent price, but again, you'll have to pay shipping (annoyingly enough, the local brick-and-mortar store doesn't stock them). You can also get pipettes from Amazon.com and use Prime shipping, if you have that (I haven't tried these pipettes yet, but I have a dozen for next week). Also, Walmart has 2-packs for $1.37 in the pharmacy department, although the Walmart I went to only had one package.
Also, the Inquiry in Action suggested using little disposable condiment containers to put the liquids in. I found Diamond brand "Multi-purpose mini cups", 50 cups plus lids, in the plastic cup aisle of Walmart near the Dixie cups. These are essentially the same thing; this saved me having to go to some sort of fast food place and taking a boatload of their condiment containers. It occurred to me that little foil petit four papers (like you'd use for mini-cupcakes or somesuch) might work.
The Inquiry in Action directions suggested taping these to the table to prevent spills. I didn't do this. Wow, TAKE TOWELS ALONG! Really, we had spills all over the place! And it wasn't just a matter of knocking over the containers -- some of the kids really weren't that great with how to drop liquid a single drop at a time out of an eyedropper, and therefore were squirting an entire dropper full onto the paper and all over the table. I had wondered about that, especially with some of the younger boys -- it's something that's worked on in the Montessori classroom at a much younger age, but I had a suspicion that some of these kids had never had the experience. Even the ones with coordination seemed fairly clueless about how much liquid they needed to suck up in the dropper ("I need more alcohol!", "No you don't -- you only need 1 drop, and you have about 1/4 teaspoon in that cup, which is gobs-a-plenty"). There was also a tendency to set the eyedropper in the cup, leaning it against the side, often flipping the entire thing over.
So, anyway, I'd been mentally (and physically) prepared for the chaos of having liquids go all over. And I was therefor able to stay pretty calm when the chaos developed. Also, let me say it again -- having 3 adults to help with 3 groups of students was SO GOOD. High school age students would also make great helpers.
A bonus was that by having more adults working with the kids we were able to direct the kids to write more on their lab sheets, and have more small group discussion with them.
I had only prepared to do 2 of the activities within the hour-long class -- Look-alike Liquids, and Developing Tests. By the time we cleaned up everything we had about 10 minutes left of class, so we headed outside to take advantage of the gorgeous weather (60F in January!). Next week we'll try combining liquids during the 3rd and 4th activities.
We started class by taking a look at the polarity of water. I had them tell me the chemical formula (H2O) so we could continue to review the names of atoms. I drew a picture of the molecule on the board, then had everyone gather in a tight group in the middle of the room (a couple of kids weren't comfortable with being in a big group like this, so they simply watched). I explained that everyone's right hand was positive and everyone's left hand was negative; all of our right hands wanted to touch everyone else's left hands, and vice versa. That was my simple explanation of surface tension -- the water all wants to stay together that way (homeschool kids often don't get a chance to do group things like this, having to rely on imagination). Now, if we all moved over to the wall and decided we all wanted our hands to touch the wall as much as we wanted them to touch each other, that would be like water soaking into paper. And if someone gave us a bunch of red and blue balls, and we all wanted a red ball in our left hand and a blue ball in our right hand, that would be like dissolving NaCl in water (plus, bonus, we would be so involved with the red and blue balls that if we were next to the wall we wouldn't be quite so interested in touching it with our hands).
Then we started the Look-Alike Liquids activities. We divided the class into 3 groups -- 4 students, 4 students, and 5 students (1 girl was home sick). I had an extra adult helper, so that was really handy. We passed out the labelled eyedroppers. Each group needed a total of 5 eyedroppers for the day's experiments. WHERE TO FIND THAT MANY EYEDROPPERS: Our co-op had 10 eyedroppers already. Discount School Supply has them fairly cheap online, although you'll have to pay shipping. Dick Blick also has a decent price, but again, you'll have to pay shipping (annoyingly enough, the local brick-and-mortar store doesn't stock them). You can also get pipettes from Amazon.com and use Prime shipping, if you have that (I haven't tried these pipettes yet, but I have a dozen for next week). Also, Walmart has 2-packs for $1.37 in the pharmacy department, although the Walmart I went to only had one package.
Also, the Inquiry in Action suggested using little disposable condiment containers to put the liquids in. I found Diamond brand "Multi-purpose mini cups", 50 cups plus lids, in the plastic cup aisle of Walmart near the Dixie cups. These are essentially the same thing; this saved me having to go to some sort of fast food place and taking a boatload of their condiment containers. It occurred to me that little foil petit four papers (like you'd use for mini-cupcakes or somesuch) might work.
The Inquiry in Action directions suggested taping these to the table to prevent spills. I didn't do this. Wow, TAKE TOWELS ALONG! Really, we had spills all over the place! And it wasn't just a matter of knocking over the containers -- some of the kids really weren't that great with how to drop liquid a single drop at a time out of an eyedropper, and therefore were squirting an entire dropper full onto the paper and all over the table. I had wondered about that, especially with some of the younger boys -- it's something that's worked on in the Montessori classroom at a much younger age, but I had a suspicion that some of these kids had never had the experience. Even the ones with coordination seemed fairly clueless about how much liquid they needed to suck up in the dropper ("I need more alcohol!", "No you don't -- you only need 1 drop, and you have about 1/4 teaspoon in that cup, which is gobs-a-plenty"). There was also a tendency to set the eyedropper in the cup, leaning it against the side, often flipping the entire thing over.
So, anyway, I'd been mentally (and physically) prepared for the chaos of having liquids go all over. And I was therefor able to stay pretty calm when the chaos developed. Also, let me say it again -- having 3 adults to help with 3 groups of students was SO GOOD. High school age students would also make great helpers.
A bonus was that by having more adults working with the kids we were able to direct the kids to write more on their lab sheets, and have more small group discussion with them.
I had only prepared to do 2 of the activities within the hour-long class -- Look-alike Liquids, and Developing Tests. By the time we cleaned up everything we had about 10 minutes left of class, so we headed outside to take advantage of the gorgeous weather (60F in January!). Next week we'll try combining liquids during the 3rd and 4th activities.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Co-op Science Week 18
Chapter 2 of ACS Inquiry in Action
This week we tried to identify a mystery crystal.
We started off by giving the students 4 knowns: sugar, salt, MSG, and Epsom salts. I had written those 4 names in silver marker on the corners of half-sheets of black construction paper, which I handed out. I also wrote the chemical formula for each on the board, and gave a bit of commentary. I'm trying to get them used to seeing things like "NaCl" -- Thalia said that she absorbed an amazing amount through the years from just being exposed to us mentioning various concepts in the course of conversation.
For example, I told them I thought "maybe sodium was Na because that was short for 'natrum', which is what the Egyptians used to mummify -- hey, did any of you ever mummify a chicken? (blank stares from class) Really? I thought that was a standard homeschool thing to do for history ...." etc. In other words, the random prattle my kids have been subjected to for years, which has apparently worked as an introductory course in Random Stuff.
We handed out copies of the first activity sheet so they could follow along with the reading, and answer questions or draw pictures as they desired.
We also handed out magnifying glasses. Our co-op has a bunch of plastic ones, so I have no tips on where to find cheap ones, although I'll note that CVS struck me as fairly expensive. The salt, sugar and Epsom salts I had around the house (one girls was eager to share that they used Epsom salt to remove a stinger when her brother had a bee sting). I used to have a little container of Accent (MSG) but had thrown it out years ago -- I wasn't even sure it was still sold -- does anyone actually USE this stuff? But I found some at Target, along with a box of the unknown, which was kosher salt. And the other mom and I walked around distributing small piles of the various crystals on their construction paper.
The kids really liked using the magnifying glasses on the crystals. A few thought the mystery crystal was sea salt. I asked how sure they were, and moved on to the next activity -- the hardness test.
(Although one boy was pretty sure we should try to identify the unknown by feeding all of the crystals to fish -- I assumed he was talking about doing an LD50, although there IS an aquarium in the room, so who knows what was going through his head.)
We talked a little about controlling the experiment -- how will you know that you're treating each crystal the same, without variability? Really a pretty decent discussion -- the kids seemed really engaged in the necessity to think like scientists. I think this might've been the point at which I reminded them that Galileo just made do with the equipment he had centuries ago -- he didn't have the uber-accurate digital clocks, so he measured his pulse to gauge time (I'd brought this up last fall in class). We distributed plastic spoons, and set them loose crushing crystals, recording their observations on the appropriate handout if they so chose.
Finally, the solubility test. I gave a quick rundown on why we measure by weight rather than volume (this was outlined in the ACS handouts -- I used Rice Chex for my demo, and a bucket balance we had at home [probably for elementary math, although I really don't recall why we have it] -- as usual, the kids liked the part where I pounded the Rice Chex into little bits, although they were quite argumentative about whether we had the EXACT SAME AMOUNT afterwards). I also drew a quick graph on how the amount of sugar that will go into solution varies by temperature, while salt pretty much remains the same -- this was also in the ACS material -- I asked the class if they were used to reading graphs, and again got the blank stares, but forged ahead based on the above-mentioned theory that they should be exposed to new concepts even if they don't know exactly what I'm talking about.
Also, when I'd looked up the chemical formula for MSG I noticed that the wikipedia article gives all sorts of standard info for it, which I showed them on the iPad. Things like the melting point, the LD50 ("Oral, for rats.", "but why do they use rats? Rats are really cool!", "I know -- we have pet rats -- that's just what they often use for those experiments.") and solubility -- scientists have figured out this stuff and have this info around in charts to help them figure out new stuff. Pretty clever, eh?
I demonstrated how to do salt and sugar -- dissolving them in hot water (I had taken hot water in a Thermos), swirling in plastic cups while the other mom counted out 20 seconds on her watch. Then we formed 3 groups, I measured out the weight equivalent of 10 paper clips worth of each substance using the bucket balance so each group had samples of all 5 (salt, sugar, MSG, Epsom salt, unknown) which we put in tiny Dixie cups, handed out plastic cups, and had each group organize themselves. The other mom counted out the seconds for everyone en masse while they slowly swirled their cups. It was really a pretty cool experiment, and we discussed how the different things dissolved.
The final activity per the ACS curriculum involved re-crystalizing the water that had just been poured off of the crystals. I knew we wouldn't have time for that in class, so I had done it at home the day before, and took the plastic cups of crystals in to show the kids.
And, in the end, the kids who guessed sea salt were pretty close in knowing what the mystery crystal was. I really liked the more creative guesses, though, like Splenda and white sand -- I sort of suspect the kids who said "sea salt" just figured out how most of these demos-for-kids work ("okay, they won't have anything TOO weird for us to figure out") while the outliers will do better in a real lab some day.
Really, we barely had time to get through all of these activities in an hour, plus do a little clean up of the water we'd spilled on the tables. I think we're going to slow down the pace a bit, since I feel like we're rushing through all of this helter-skelter.
I think the kids are learning a lot about how scientists work, though. As I said, they seem really engaged in the process. No clue if they're actually learning any chemistry.
This week we tried to identify a mystery crystal.
We started off by giving the students 4 knowns: sugar, salt, MSG, and Epsom salts. I had written those 4 names in silver marker on the corners of half-sheets of black construction paper, which I handed out. I also wrote the chemical formula for each on the board, and gave a bit of commentary. I'm trying to get them used to seeing things like "NaCl" -- Thalia said that she absorbed an amazing amount through the years from just being exposed to us mentioning various concepts in the course of conversation.
For example, I told them I thought "maybe sodium was Na because that was short for 'natrum', which is what the Egyptians used to mummify -- hey, did any of you ever mummify a chicken? (blank stares from class) Really? I thought that was a standard homeschool thing to do for history ...." etc. In other words, the random prattle my kids have been subjected to for years, which has apparently worked as an introductory course in Random Stuff.
We handed out copies of the first activity sheet so they could follow along with the reading, and answer questions or draw pictures as they desired.
We also handed out magnifying glasses. Our co-op has a bunch of plastic ones, so I have no tips on where to find cheap ones, although I'll note that CVS struck me as fairly expensive. The salt, sugar and Epsom salts I had around the house (one girls was eager to share that they used Epsom salt to remove a stinger when her brother had a bee sting). I used to have a little container of Accent (MSG) but had thrown it out years ago -- I wasn't even sure it was still sold -- does anyone actually USE this stuff? But I found some at Target, along with a box of the unknown, which was kosher salt. And the other mom and I walked around distributing small piles of the various crystals on their construction paper.
The kids really liked using the magnifying glasses on the crystals. A few thought the mystery crystal was sea salt. I asked how sure they were, and moved on to the next activity -- the hardness test.
(Although one boy was pretty sure we should try to identify the unknown by feeding all of the crystals to fish -- I assumed he was talking about doing an LD50, although there IS an aquarium in the room, so who knows what was going through his head.)
We talked a little about controlling the experiment -- how will you know that you're treating each crystal the same, without variability? Really a pretty decent discussion -- the kids seemed really engaged in the necessity to think like scientists. I think this might've been the point at which I reminded them that Galileo just made do with the equipment he had centuries ago -- he didn't have the uber-accurate digital clocks, so he measured his pulse to gauge time (I'd brought this up last fall in class). We distributed plastic spoons, and set them loose crushing crystals, recording their observations on the appropriate handout if they so chose.
Finally, the solubility test. I gave a quick rundown on why we measure by weight rather than volume (this was outlined in the ACS handouts -- I used Rice Chex for my demo, and a bucket balance we had at home [probably for elementary math, although I really don't recall why we have it] -- as usual, the kids liked the part where I pounded the Rice Chex into little bits, although they were quite argumentative about whether we had the EXACT SAME AMOUNT afterwards). I also drew a quick graph on how the amount of sugar that will go into solution varies by temperature, while salt pretty much remains the same -- this was also in the ACS material -- I asked the class if they were used to reading graphs, and again got the blank stares, but forged ahead based on the above-mentioned theory that they should be exposed to new concepts even if they don't know exactly what I'm talking about.
Also, when I'd looked up the chemical formula for MSG I noticed that the wikipedia article gives all sorts of standard info for it, which I showed them on the iPad. Things like the melting point, the LD50 ("Oral, for rats.", "but why do they use rats? Rats are really cool!", "I know -- we have pet rats -- that's just what they often use for those experiments.") and solubility -- scientists have figured out this stuff and have this info around in charts to help them figure out new stuff. Pretty clever, eh?
I demonstrated how to do salt and sugar -- dissolving them in hot water (I had taken hot water in a Thermos), swirling in plastic cups while the other mom counted out 20 seconds on her watch. Then we formed 3 groups, I measured out the weight equivalent of 10 paper clips worth of each substance using the bucket balance so each group had samples of all 5 (salt, sugar, MSG, Epsom salt, unknown) which we put in tiny Dixie cups, handed out plastic cups, and had each group organize themselves. The other mom counted out the seconds for everyone en masse while they slowly swirled their cups. It was really a pretty cool experiment, and we discussed how the different things dissolved.
The final activity per the ACS curriculum involved re-crystalizing the water that had just been poured off of the crystals. I knew we wouldn't have time for that in class, so I had done it at home the day before, and took the plastic cups of crystals in to show the kids.
And, in the end, the kids who guessed sea salt were pretty close in knowing what the mystery crystal was. I really liked the more creative guesses, though, like Splenda and white sand -- I sort of suspect the kids who said "sea salt" just figured out how most of these demos-for-kids work ("okay, they won't have anything TOO weird for us to figure out") while the outliers will do better in a real lab some day.
Really, we barely had time to get through all of these activities in an hour, plus do a little clean up of the water we'd spilled on the tables. I think we're going to slow down the pace a bit, since I feel like we're rushing through all of this helter-skelter.
I think the kids are learning a lot about how scientists work, though. As I said, they seem really engaged in the process. No clue if they're actually learning any chemistry.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Co-op Science Week 17
Oh, how proud and excited I was to have a curriculum all laid out for the next several weeks! I started working through the next lesson several days ahead of time, happy to be so organized.
But then, whoops, I got sick. To the point that I did NOTHING for several days. And decided it was time to haul out Plan B.
When I started teaching this co-op science class I decided I needed to have a Plan B in case I couldn't be there, or I absolutely couldn't get stuff together to teach on some particular week. Hey, weird stuff happens, and when you're in charge of a bunch of kids for an hour, it's nice to have a Plan B.
My back-up plan was Zoom Puff Mobiles. Over Christmas I'd purchased one of those books of Lifesavers that has several rolls of the candy inside -- it had about 84 Lifesavers in total. Opening up one of the rolls, I realized that our usual drinking straws were actually too big to fit through the hole, so I stopped by a dollar store and got some cheapy narrow straws. Then it was a matter of printing out several copies of the pdf file (which is in the "Printable" section of the website), adding paperclips, scissors, tape and scrap paper to my supplies, and voila, instant busywork!
When we all arrived at class we talked a little about chemistry. We discussed what we had done the week before (dissolving M&Ms) and I asked if anyone had tried any other experiments, like trying to dissolve the coating in sugar water. No one had. Then we discussed the Periodic Table of the Elements just a bit -- I wanted to get a feel for whether any of them had a clue what it was. I borrowed Ellen McHenry's analogy of the elements being like cooking ingredients in a kitchen. Most of the kids seemed to be fairly clueless about the Periodic Table.
Then I said, "Okay, that's it for chemistry. Let's do an engineering project!", and enlisted people to start handing out supplies. A couple of kids asked if they could work as a team, which was fine.
We had a quick math lesson about how many Lifesavers would be needed for everyone in the class to get 4 vs. how many were in the packages I had, bearing in mind that some of the Lifesavers would be broken (and, indeed, the cherry ones seemed to be pretty fragile).
Also, BONUS, I brought extra supplies in case I had extra kids in the class, since this seems to be happening consistently in everything I do lately. And, sure enough, there was an extra kid. But I totally expected to have an extra child that no one had bothered to tell me about ahead of time! Yay me! Take that, universe! I'm on to your tricks!
The kids who have been in the class the entire time had a blast. They worked fairly quietly (thankfully, since I sort of felt like laying down on the floor and taking a nap), and showed great co-operation in sharing things like tape dispensers. Some of the new kids were a little timid about the entire thing -- I kept repeating that real engineers try an idea, see if it works, then sometimes need to try something new. It's really okay to just dive in and try things. And it's okay to be shy. Also, please take your creation with you, as I actually think Lifesavers are sort of repulsive, particularly after they've been rolled over a table several times.
I love seeing what they come up with on things like this. We end up with great discussions on why some ideas work and some don't. Our best sail design was fairly low-to-the-Puff Mobile, and was concave.
Of course, now I need to restock my Plan B supplies, probably with another Zoom challenge. Hmmm....
But then, whoops, I got sick. To the point that I did NOTHING for several days. And decided it was time to haul out Plan B.
When I started teaching this co-op science class I decided I needed to have a Plan B in case I couldn't be there, or I absolutely couldn't get stuff together to teach on some particular week. Hey, weird stuff happens, and when you're in charge of a bunch of kids for an hour, it's nice to have a Plan B.
My back-up plan was Zoom Puff Mobiles. Over Christmas I'd purchased one of those books of Lifesavers that has several rolls of the candy inside -- it had about 84 Lifesavers in total. Opening up one of the rolls, I realized that our usual drinking straws were actually too big to fit through the hole, so I stopped by a dollar store and got some cheapy narrow straws. Then it was a matter of printing out several copies of the pdf file (which is in the "Printable" section of the website), adding paperclips, scissors, tape and scrap paper to my supplies, and voila, instant busywork!
When we all arrived at class we talked a little about chemistry. We discussed what we had done the week before (dissolving M&Ms) and I asked if anyone had tried any other experiments, like trying to dissolve the coating in sugar water. No one had. Then we discussed the Periodic Table of the Elements just a bit -- I wanted to get a feel for whether any of them had a clue what it was. I borrowed Ellen McHenry's analogy of the elements being like cooking ingredients in a kitchen. Most of the kids seemed to be fairly clueless about the Periodic Table.
Then I said, "Okay, that's it for chemistry. Let's do an engineering project!", and enlisted people to start handing out supplies. A couple of kids asked if they could work as a team, which was fine.
We had a quick math lesson about how many Lifesavers would be needed for everyone in the class to get 4 vs. how many were in the packages I had, bearing in mind that some of the Lifesavers would be broken (and, indeed, the cherry ones seemed to be pretty fragile).
Also, BONUS, I brought extra supplies in case I had extra kids in the class, since this seems to be happening consistently in everything I do lately. And, sure enough, there was an extra kid. But I totally expected to have an extra child that no one had bothered to tell me about ahead of time! Yay me! Take that, universe! I'm on to your tricks!
The kids who have been in the class the entire time had a blast. They worked fairly quietly (thankfully, since I sort of felt like laying down on the floor and taking a nap), and showed great co-operation in sharing things like tape dispensers. Some of the new kids were a little timid about the entire thing -- I kept repeating that real engineers try an idea, see if it works, then sometimes need to try something new. It's really okay to just dive in and try things. And it's okay to be shy. Also, please take your creation with you, as I actually think Lifesavers are sort of repulsive, particularly after they've been rolled over a table several times.
I love seeing what they come up with on things like this. We end up with great discussions on why some ideas work and some don't. Our best sail design was fairly low-to-the-Puff Mobile, and was concave.
Of course, now I need to restock my Plan B supplies, probably with another Zoom challenge. Hmmm....
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Co-op Science Week 16
Back to co-op after Christmas, ready to start our second semester. This semester we'll be focusing more on Chemistry.
And we've also added 3 more kids to the class. I knew about 2 of them, but the 3rd was a surprise (Didn't that just happen to me in Girl Scouts a few days ago? Why, yes, it did! Random extra kids are showing up at things I'm supposed to organize on a regular basis, it seems.) I've gotta say, going from 11 kids to 14 kids was a leap -- lots of busy-ness, lots of noise. The kids are all relatively good, there are just more of them now.
And when I got home a mom emailed me to ask if her 2nd grader could join the class. Sigh. I let that sit a few days while I pondered, but then I eventually said that I think we're running out of room in the classroom. Plus I've noticed that some of the younger kids sometimes struggle more in a large group setting -- kids that are pretty bold and outgoing, and who would do just fine with the material in a small group (like in their own home with siblings) are falling right through the cracks when they're in a large group, getting lost and not keeping up.
But, anyway, my big find of Christmas break was the American Chemical Society's Inquiry in Action, which is a free chemistry curriculum for grades 3-5. Wow. Okay, first I found the ACS middle school curriculum, and I seriously thought about using it. Really, any of the kids in the class could probably do the middle school stuff, particularly at home. But I decided to go with the lower level because it looked simpler for me to implement, plus it involved M&Ms. Yes, the candy.
"Can I have some of the M&Ms to eat?"
"You know, my family's prediction was that at least 3 of you would ask to eat the M&Ms today. And my personal prediction was that YOU would be the first one to say it. Glad to see you didn't change much over break."
Smile. Hug. Five minutes later, same child asks again: "Can I have some of the M&Ms to eat?"
So. I downloaded the entire file onto my iPad, put it in Goodreader so I could browse through it, jotted down lists of stuff I'd need to take to class, printed out some of the handouts, and voila, class was planned. It is AMAZING how much easier it is to have someone else plan what's going to happen rather than choosing a topic and coming up with all of the demonstrations on my own.
We did the first 3 activities from Chapter 1 during our class time. We observed M&Ms dissolving on paper plates (I used the Solo brand plates that had sort of a hard finish on the paper rather than styrofoam or plastic -- I used the dessert size). Everyone had their own M&M and plate for that. Then we dumped the water and M&Ms (IMPORTANT TIP: It's easiest to slide the plate of water to the edge of the table and then tip it into a bucket or some other large container. The container needs to be wide enough that you could easily fit the entire plate in, if needed. I had taken a pitcher, but that was way too narrow, so I just dumped everything out of the 18 gallon plastic storage bin I'd used to transport all of the class equipment. Also, the container should be deep enough to carry around without all the water sloshing out. Dump the water in the container, but keep hold of the plate -- you can wipe it with a paper towel and re-use it.)
Before class started I'd had the kids who wandered in early draw bullseyes on some of the plates. We distributed those, and next judged whether different colors dissolved more quickly. The kids were in 2 groups of 7, and each group had 5 plates to look at. They did find some variability in the diffusion rates. I wonder if that was partially because we ended up with various depths of water in the plates, and some of our M&Ms weren't totally covered.
Anyway, dump THAT batch of water and M&Ms, clean up, and, oddly, all the kids started packing up to leave. ???? "Well, we were cleaning up, so we thought it was time to go." No, we were cleaning up so we wouldn't have a huge mess at the end. Also, the clock is broken in the classroom, so they had no clue. Still time for another experiment!
"Okay, what do you think would happen if we put 2 M&Ms in the water fairly close together?" I drew a couple of possibilities on the whiteboard. "Would a yellow and a blue make a huge pool of green around both of them? Would it look more like a Venn diagram, with a green overlap in the middle between them? What do you think?"
This time they worked in pairs, with mild squabbling about which colors each pair wanted to try. One pair ended up with 3 M&Ms, and we all figured, hey, maybe that'll be interesting. I held up a ruler to show them approximately how much distance we mean by "2 centimeters".
They were VERY impressed by what happened next, and running around looking at each others' plates. The plate with 3 was quite an item. One of the kids was excited to realize that their end of the table wasn't level -- he had diagnosed it by looking at the water level vs. the height of the 2 M&Ms. Then it became the fad to gently blow across the surface of the water to mix the colors. I did a brief wrap up, saying that if we left these plates here for a day the colors would've eventually mixed. Then a final clean up, and they were off to history class.
My thoughts:
We only made it half way through the demonstrations listed in this chapter, but I think it's enough. The main point, I felt, was that we change ONE variable at a time when we're seeing how things work. We'd already worked on that last fall, so I thought we were okay with just a brief review this spring.
The fifth graders in particular loved having the handouts. They were making notes on them. I've emphasized that as they get to middle school next year they'll be doing more lab reports; I think they liked having the practice available to them.
After I got home I sent an email to all parents with a link to the pdf of the science behind sugar dissolving in water, which they had the option of going over with their child. I also pointed out the links to the 3 related experiments we did NOT do.
I also delivered a small Dixie cup of M&Ms to That Kid at lunch break, with permission of his mom.
How to do this without a sink in the room:
I took old plastic water bottles with me, and had the kids go to the water fountain in pairs to refill them as needed. I had a pair of kids take the plastic container of waste-water-plus-M&Ms to the restroom, where they dumped it into a toilet and then flushed.
So far I would High Recommend the ACS materials for co-op use! And I'm thinking about using the middle school chemistry for our own home science class for 7th grade next year.
And we've also added 3 more kids to the class. I knew about 2 of them, but the 3rd was a surprise (Didn't that just happen to me in Girl Scouts a few days ago? Why, yes, it did! Random extra kids are showing up at things I'm supposed to organize on a regular basis, it seems.) I've gotta say, going from 11 kids to 14 kids was a leap -- lots of busy-ness, lots of noise. The kids are all relatively good, there are just more of them now.
And when I got home a mom emailed me to ask if her 2nd grader could join the class. Sigh. I let that sit a few days while I pondered, but then I eventually said that I think we're running out of room in the classroom. Plus I've noticed that some of the younger kids sometimes struggle more in a large group setting -- kids that are pretty bold and outgoing, and who would do just fine with the material in a small group (like in their own home with siblings) are falling right through the cracks when they're in a large group, getting lost and not keeping up.
But, anyway, my big find of Christmas break was the American Chemical Society's Inquiry in Action, which is a free chemistry curriculum for grades 3-5. Wow. Okay, first I found the ACS middle school curriculum, and I seriously thought about using it. Really, any of the kids in the class could probably do the middle school stuff, particularly at home. But I decided to go with the lower level because it looked simpler for me to implement, plus it involved M&Ms. Yes, the candy.
"Can I have some of the M&Ms to eat?"
"You know, my family's prediction was that at least 3 of you would ask to eat the M&Ms today. And my personal prediction was that YOU would be the first one to say it. Glad to see you didn't change much over break."
Smile. Hug. Five minutes later, same child asks again: "Can I have some of the M&Ms to eat?"
So. I downloaded the entire file onto my iPad, put it in Goodreader so I could browse through it, jotted down lists of stuff I'd need to take to class, printed out some of the handouts, and voila, class was planned. It is AMAZING how much easier it is to have someone else plan what's going to happen rather than choosing a topic and coming up with all of the demonstrations on my own.
We did the first 3 activities from Chapter 1 during our class time. We observed M&Ms dissolving on paper plates (I used the Solo brand plates that had sort of a hard finish on the paper rather than styrofoam or plastic -- I used the dessert size). Everyone had their own M&M and plate for that. Then we dumped the water and M&Ms (IMPORTANT TIP: It's easiest to slide the plate of water to the edge of the table and then tip it into a bucket or some other large container. The container needs to be wide enough that you could easily fit the entire plate in, if needed. I had taken a pitcher, but that was way too narrow, so I just dumped everything out of the 18 gallon plastic storage bin I'd used to transport all of the class equipment. Also, the container should be deep enough to carry around without all the water sloshing out. Dump the water in the container, but keep hold of the plate -- you can wipe it with a paper towel and re-use it.)
Before class started I'd had the kids who wandered in early draw bullseyes on some of the plates. We distributed those, and next judged whether different colors dissolved more quickly. The kids were in 2 groups of 7, and each group had 5 plates to look at. They did find some variability in the diffusion rates. I wonder if that was partially because we ended up with various depths of water in the plates, and some of our M&Ms weren't totally covered.
Anyway, dump THAT batch of water and M&Ms, clean up, and, oddly, all the kids started packing up to leave. ???? "Well, we were cleaning up, so we thought it was time to go." No, we were cleaning up so we wouldn't have a huge mess at the end. Also, the clock is broken in the classroom, so they had no clue. Still time for another experiment!
"Okay, what do you think would happen if we put 2 M&Ms in the water fairly close together?" I drew a couple of possibilities on the whiteboard. "Would a yellow and a blue make a huge pool of green around both of them? Would it look more like a Venn diagram, with a green overlap in the middle between them? What do you think?"
This time they worked in pairs, with mild squabbling about which colors each pair wanted to try. One pair ended up with 3 M&Ms, and we all figured, hey, maybe that'll be interesting. I held up a ruler to show them approximately how much distance we mean by "2 centimeters".
They were VERY impressed by what happened next, and running around looking at each others' plates. The plate with 3 was quite an item. One of the kids was excited to realize that their end of the table wasn't level -- he had diagnosed it by looking at the water level vs. the height of the 2 M&Ms. Then it became the fad to gently blow across the surface of the water to mix the colors. I did a brief wrap up, saying that if we left these plates here for a day the colors would've eventually mixed. Then a final clean up, and they were off to history class.
My thoughts:
We only made it half way through the demonstrations listed in this chapter, but I think it's enough. The main point, I felt, was that we change ONE variable at a time when we're seeing how things work. We'd already worked on that last fall, so I thought we were okay with just a brief review this spring.
The fifth graders in particular loved having the handouts. They were making notes on them. I've emphasized that as they get to middle school next year they'll be doing more lab reports; I think they liked having the practice available to them.
After I got home I sent an email to all parents with a link to the pdf of the science behind sugar dissolving in water, which they had the option of going over with their child. I also pointed out the links to the 3 related experiments we did NOT do.
I also delivered a small Dixie cup of M&Ms to That Kid at lunch break, with permission of his mom.
How to do this without a sink in the room:
I took old plastic water bottles with me, and had the kids go to the water fountain in pairs to refill them as needed. I had a pair of kids take the plastic container of waste-water-plus-M&Ms to the restroom, where they dumped it into a toilet and then flushed.
So far I would High Recommend the ACS materials for co-op use! And I'm thinking about using the middle school chemistry for our own home science class for 7th grade next year.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Co-op Science Weeks 13, 14, 15
Oops! I thought I'd get around to writing these up over Christmas break, but I was too busy Christmassing. And, alas, I seem to not have notes about what we did, which is annoying, because there were some things that were worth passing on to other people trying to lead a co-op class for this age group.
Week 13 was another class on Light, using experiments from a book series which, unfortunately, I don't have written down. One of those science series that looks so good on the shelf, the photos are so cool and the directions so clear ... and the experiments don't actually work. Such a fail. Unfortunately we were doing the experiments on the fly during class since I thought that it would be a good chance for the kids to learn to read about and set up this stuff. Wow, I didn't expect every. single. one. to fail.
Wow, they LOVED this activity, and could've worked on it for hours and hours. And it was so fun to hear their discussions about how to accomplish their building visions. My biggest regret is that we did this in an upstairs room, so we couldn't easily show off their creations -- we needed to either make them on something that could be transported to the common area where we later held the party, or else have made them in that area in the first place. For the record, the structures tended to sag over time. Also, not only did kids want to eat the marshmallows**, they wanted to eat the dry spaghetti.
**"Okay, understand this -- you have a FINITE number of marshmallows. You do know what 'finite' means, right?" Oddly, several of them didn't. So we had to define that, then discuss the implication that if they ate a bunch of their group's marshmallows, they would not have as many marshmallows to build with, and thus probably have a smaller tower.
Week 13 was another class on Light, using experiments from a book series which, unfortunately, I don't have written down. One of those science series that looks so good on the shelf, the photos are so cool and the directions so clear ... and the experiments don't actually work. Such a fail. Unfortunately we were doing the experiments on the fly during class since I thought that it would be a good chance for the kids to learn to read about and set up this stuff. Wow, I didn't expect every. single. one. to fail.
I think this was the week that I lit a candle in a darkened room and we looked at it through 2 popsicle sticks held close together (idea I found online). We also tried looking at it with our eyes squinted up so we were seeing it though our eyelashes. Then I handed out refraction glasses I'd gotten cheap online (again, sorry, no memory of the vendor, but I got a box of 15 or 20 for a cheap price and quick delivery off of Amazon.com). Annabeth took a picture of our Christmas tree by holding a pair of glasses up to the camera. For the record, our tree has white lights only.
Week 14 was on Sound. I had tried several cool looking experiments from the book on Sound from the above series ... again, failure. Fortunately I figured this out at home, so I came up with some alternatives. I took in a slinky to show the difference between longitudinal and transverse waves; also, we could see the "echo".
We set up dominoes to show the difference between sound going through a liquid and air (dominoes closer together represent a solid, farther apart represent air -- which group falls faster?). The dominoes took FOREVER to set up, and about 10 seconds to knock over. The girls in the group did okay with it, but the boys complained it was boring. I also gave a brief discussion about how sometimes science IS boring, or at least seems that way -- you have to do all this detailed work to figure stuff out, and it can seem tedious at times.
We blew across bottles (I had learned last year that plastic water bottles are tough to do this with due to the flimsy plastic, so I had collected both glass bottles and more rigid plastic bottles from sparkling mineral water, and took in a huge assortment).
We stretched plastic over a bowl, put blue sugar sprinkles on top, then made noise to make the sugar sprinkles jump with the vibrations.
And week 15 was the final week before Christmas break. We had a half day of co-op, and a party starting at noon. I suspected the kids were going to be a little wound up in our midmorning class, so we did an engineering challenge -- how high can you build a structure using uncooked spaghetti and mini marshmallows? They worked in groups, usually on some sort of plastic tablecloth to help prevent marshmallow smashing into sticky messes on the table tops.
Wow, they LOVED this activity, and could've worked on it for hours and hours. And it was so fun to hear their discussions about how to accomplish their building visions. My biggest regret is that we did this in an upstairs room, so we couldn't easily show off their creations -- we needed to either make them on something that could be transported to the common area where we later held the party, or else have made them in that area in the first place. For the record, the structures tended to sag over time. Also, not only did kids want to eat the marshmallows**, they wanted to eat the dry spaghetti.
**"Okay, understand this -- you have a FINITE number of marshmallows. You do know what 'finite' means, right?" Oddly, several of them didn't. So we had to define that, then discuss the implication that if they ate a bunch of their group's marshmallows, they would not have as many marshmallows to build with, and thus probably have a smaller tower.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Co-op Science Week 12
Continuation of light and optics.
We started off by playing with a set of spinning top optical illusions I'd found at Hobby Lobby. It included Benham's top, a spiral that produced the waterfall effect, and some disks that worked better under fluorescent lights. We discussed briefly why these things appear the way they do; I included the information that scientists don't know everything about these illusions, so the kids could maybe discover more about them some day.
Next, discussion:
What produces light? (Sun, lightbulbs, flames; the moon simply reflects rather than producing)
What happens to light? (travels in a straight line forever unless it hits something)
What happens when it hits something? (sometimes passes through whatever it hits; may convert to heat or other energy; may bend)
While talking about these things, did the demo of shining a flashlight through index cards to show this concept (although I just cut notches in the bottom of mine instead of punch holes -- directions in Super Science Projects about Light and Optics by Allan Cobb). Answered repeated queries as to whether we could set the modeling clay on fire with a firm "No".
Vocabulary words: Opaque, transparent, translucent. I broke these down into their roots. Mostly I was surprised that some of the kids didn't know them. Shone flashlight on cardstock, copy paper, and through glass.
More vocabulary: reflection, refraction.
For reflection we talked about mirrors, and how the light bounces off at the same angle it hits. I had made a shoebox periscope using cheap little mirrors from the craft store (Hobby Lobby? Michael's?) and a bunch of duct tape (by the way, it was amazingly tedious to get the mirrors lined up correctly). Pretty much everyone was familiar with the concept, but no one had actually made one before. Again, I used the directions from Allan Cobb's Super Science Projects about Light and Optics We shone the flashlight through it, we used it as a periscope, we shone a laser pointer through it. I had to keep moving one kid's head since he seemed determined to have the laser pointer reflection go right into his eye in spite of my saying we were NOT going to point it into anyone's eyes.
Speaking of which, Rick loaned me his nice red laser pointer he uses in presentations -- one of the nice, expensive ones. He has a friend with one of the green ones, which would've impressed the kids immensely, I'm sure, especially since I told them that in many places it's illegal to shine them up in the sky at night, and that you can't even take them into some countries. As you can imagine, the set-the-clay-on-fire, shine-the-laser-in-the-eye crowd instantly realized that their deepest desire was to obtain strong laser pointers and shine them in the sky.
For refraction, I drew a picture on the board of a bird's eye view of all of them holding hands and running in a straight line; the line was at about a 45 degree angle to a body of water. As the first kids got to the water they had to slow down since it's harder to run in water than on dry land ... eventually, the line looked bent. I got this analogy from Vicki Cobb's Light Action, which is a book I would highly recommend if you're explaining this stuff to kids.
We refracted light with water . I put a coin in the bottom of the bowl, had everyone stand where they couldn't quite see the coin, then filled the bowl with water; the penny appeared (I'm pretty sure this same demo is one of the experiments in Apologia Physical Science). Then I placed a penny on the table, put an empty glass on top of it, filled the glass with water, set an index card on the top of the glass (so we couldn't look straight down into it) and the penny was invisible. This one really confounded one of the kids, who thought I'd done something or other with the penny even though he was watching every thing we did.
We also shone the flashlight through plastic prisms (purchased cheaply at Hobby Lobby) to bend the light and see a bit of a rainbow. It was a gloomy day, so we couldn't use sunlight to make better rainbows, unfortunately. Again, all of the kids seemed familiar with the concept, but they enjoyed messing around with the prisms. And we shone the laser pointer through the prisms, too.
Finally, we made Movie Wheels. I had shown one I'd made to some of the kids the week before when we made thaumatropes. They were surprisingly enthusiastic about this. Well, most of them were. One boy wanted to play with the tops -- we had him sit at a different table, and he eventually started making some rather sophisticated paper airplanes. Another wanted to make it, but wanted someone else to do the work -- pretty funny. We have a mirror in the room, so they could view them in there or else stand in pairs and view each others'.
A few of the kids said they'd studied all of this before, but they are enjoying studying it again. That's what we're after -- a hands-on supplement to the curriculum they're doing at home.
We started off by playing with a set of spinning top optical illusions I'd found at Hobby Lobby. It included Benham's top, a spiral that produced the waterfall effect, and some disks that worked better under fluorescent lights. We discussed briefly why these things appear the way they do; I included the information that scientists don't know everything about these illusions, so the kids could maybe discover more about them some day.
Next, discussion:
What produces light? (Sun, lightbulbs, flames; the moon simply reflects rather than producing)
What happens to light? (travels in a straight line forever unless it hits something)
What happens when it hits something? (sometimes passes through whatever it hits; may convert to heat or other energy; may bend)
While talking about these things, did the demo of shining a flashlight through index cards to show this concept (although I just cut notches in the bottom of mine instead of punch holes -- directions in Super Science Projects about Light and Optics by Allan Cobb). Answered repeated queries as to whether we could set the modeling clay on fire with a firm "No".
Vocabulary words: Opaque, transparent, translucent. I broke these down into their roots. Mostly I was surprised that some of the kids didn't know them. Shone flashlight on cardstock, copy paper, and through glass.
More vocabulary: reflection, refraction.
For reflection we talked about mirrors, and how the light bounces off at the same angle it hits. I had made a shoebox periscope using cheap little mirrors from the craft store (Hobby Lobby? Michael's?) and a bunch of duct tape (by the way, it was amazingly tedious to get the mirrors lined up correctly). Pretty much everyone was familiar with the concept, but no one had actually made one before. Again, I used the directions from Allan Cobb's Super Science Projects about Light and Optics We shone the flashlight through it, we used it as a periscope, we shone a laser pointer through it. I had to keep moving one kid's head since he seemed determined to have the laser pointer reflection go right into his eye in spite of my saying we were NOT going to point it into anyone's eyes.
Speaking of which, Rick loaned me his nice red laser pointer he uses in presentations -- one of the nice, expensive ones. He has a friend with one of the green ones, which would've impressed the kids immensely, I'm sure, especially since I told them that in many places it's illegal to shine them up in the sky at night, and that you can't even take them into some countries. As you can imagine, the set-the-clay-on-fire, shine-the-laser-in-the-eye crowd instantly realized that their deepest desire was to obtain strong laser pointers and shine them in the sky.
For refraction, I drew a picture on the board of a bird's eye view of all of them holding hands and running in a straight line; the line was at about a 45 degree angle to a body of water. As the first kids got to the water they had to slow down since it's harder to run in water than on dry land ... eventually, the line looked bent. I got this analogy from Vicki Cobb's Light Action, which is a book I would highly recommend if you're explaining this stuff to kids.
We refracted light with water . I put a coin in the bottom of the bowl, had everyone stand where they couldn't quite see the coin, then filled the bowl with water; the penny appeared (I'm pretty sure this same demo is one of the experiments in Apologia Physical Science). Then I placed a penny on the table, put an empty glass on top of it, filled the glass with water, set an index card on the top of the glass (so we couldn't look straight down into it) and the penny was invisible. This one really confounded one of the kids, who thought I'd done something or other with the penny even though he was watching every thing we did.
We also shone the flashlight through plastic prisms (purchased cheaply at Hobby Lobby) to bend the light and see a bit of a rainbow. It was a gloomy day, so we couldn't use sunlight to make better rainbows, unfortunately. Again, all of the kids seemed familiar with the concept, but they enjoyed messing around with the prisms. And we shone the laser pointer through the prisms, too.
Finally, we made Movie Wheels. I had shown one I'd made to some of the kids the week before when we made thaumatropes. They were surprisingly enthusiastic about this. Well, most of them were. One boy wanted to play with the tops -- we had him sit at a different table, and he eventually started making some rather sophisticated paper airplanes. Another wanted to make it, but wanted someone else to do the work -- pretty funny. We have a mirror in the room, so they could view them in there or else stand in pairs and view each others'.
A few of the kids said they'd studied all of this before, but they are enjoying studying it again. That's what we're after -- a hands-on supplement to the curriculum they're doing at home.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Co-op Science Week 11
This week was our Fall Open House, so we spent much of our class time getting ready for that. We stapled covers on our booklets of Newton's Laws. Several of the kids drew pictures on the front of the booklets. I brought in our catapults from an earlier session, as well as some other stuff we'd worked on -- sort of a random assortment.
(Click to enlarge pictures, if desired.)
I also had the kids decorate a poster proclaiming "3-5 SCIENCE". They drew several things we did, and several things they apparently wished we had done. There was great controversy surrounding the fact that the boys made the letter C into a monster; one of the girls drew an alternative non-monster C which I attached to the bottom of the poster. Overall I thought it was pretty cool. Annabeth had given me the heads-up that this is how we should do this, by the way -- have the kids make it themselves.
We started with thaumatropes to show the concept of persistence of vision. My co-teacher brought in a little plastic zoetrope that she'd gotten in a kid's meal somewhere -- it was way cool. I'd hoped to make our own rendition of zoetropes, but we ran out of time. Overall the kids were content to color and decorate things -- a very subdued group. I think the time change really took a toll on everyone in spite of supposedly getting more sleep.
The day before class I'd come up with
New Improved Directions for Making Thaumatropes with a Crowd of Kids:
Cut a couple of 3x5 index cards into squares (if you leave them rectangles they're too flappy to work well).
Draw your pictures on the non-lined sides, taking care that the pictures will overlap appropriately. Outline in Sharpie -- this helps the picture "pop" when you spin it. Color as desired. (You want to color it now because once you get the straw on it, it will be too lumpy to color.)
Tape a straw to the back of one side. If it's a bendy straw, make sure the bend isn't going to interfere with spinning the thaumatrope -- I put this bend against the back of the card, but you could also put it at the bottom. Or just cut it off and have a shorter straw. Also, if you use colored straws be aware that the kids will have strong opinions about which color they want.
I used Duck brand tape to tape it to the back of the index cards because it's wide and easy to tear.
Staple the front to back. Or use Scotch tape, which is what we used when we ran out of staples.
Spin. Be impressed with the picture that appears.
The kids were incredibly imaginative with their pictures: head with hat (that didn't quite line up, so the hat was sort of floating over the head, which was actually pretty cool), person in jail cell, pen writing on blank sheet of paper, jet flying through clouds, smiley face eyes with smiley face smile on the back, fish in a fish bowl .... Some kids made multiple thaumatropes, trying various ideas. Probably the most amazing was a dog (or maybe wolf) sitting on a moonlit, starlit hill howling -- on the facing card was another dog/wolf on a hill on the opposite side of the "valley", also howling. I am in awe of this group, and so glad I get to spend some time with them each week.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Co-op Science Week 10
Science class met on Halloween this week, so I invited the kids to bring in magic tricks to demonstrate to their classmates. It was fun, although many of the kids forgot to bring one in.
I had put some Soil Moist granules in water in a plastic container the night before. I took them in and announced that they were "ghost brains". The kids didn't buy it, of course. I spooned some out into small plastic bags while explaining that it was a hydrophilic polymer I had used in the garden over the summer, it would dry back out into granules if left on a paper towel, and it was pretty much the same thing that they could find in a disposable diaper. This last bit of info really elicited some cries of "eeeewwwwww!"
Then we made Slime, using the directions in the old Girl Scout Junior Badge Book in the Making It Matter Badge; these are the best directions I've found for making Slime with a crowd of kids in 3rd through 5th grade. Of course, this badge book is no longer available becauseGSUSA is a bunch of idiots GSUSA apparently believes that girls don't need STEM inspiration (or, at least, girls won't cough up the bucks to join an organization that has fun STEM projects), so here's how to do it:
Pass out cups to the kids, along with wooden popsicle sticks for stirring. Measure out 1 tablespoon of Elmer's Glue (or other glue -- there are lots of websites comparing the virtues of various glues in regards to Slime-making) into each cup (have kids help with this or not -- sort of depends on your crowd)to . Go down the row putting 3 tablespoons of water into each cup, and have them stir the water and glue together.
(For the record, all I had told them about what we were doing was that we were going to make a polymer by having using the Borax hook together the polyvinyl acetate [in the glue] sort of like paper clips hooking together lots of little chains. Some kids recognized what we were doing, most didn't. Several websites give nice explanations of the science of this demonstration, and thanks to Wikipedia I think I know the difference between polyvinyl acetate and polyvinyl alcohol.)
We then put a squirt of glow-in-the-dark paint in each cup.
Earlier I had mixed 2 tablespoons of Borax in a cup of warm water. Each cup of watery glue next got one tablespoon of the Borax solution, with directions to "keep stirring". Unfortunately as the water cooled a lot of the Borax precipitated out (I'd done this at home, and at least an hour had elapsed). So the first few cups had a few duds, as they didn't have enough Borax to start the reaction. But, wow, it was pretty cool when SURPRISE, Slime started to form in the cups that worked. Since we had plenty of cups, glue, and Borax solution, we started over on some of the duds.
We then discussed where we could go to see whether or not it would really glow in the dark -- I hadn't tried this out ahead of time and wasn't really sure. We all ran downstairs to a big room with no windows, and discovered, YES, we have glowing slime! I meant to give a quick lesson in how glow in the dark paint works, but it was lost in the excitement.
I had brought plastic bags for them to put there Slime in. So, take-home bags of Ghost Brains and Slime! Perfect Halloween science class!
I had put some Soil Moist granules in water in a plastic container the night before. I took them in and announced that they were "ghost brains". The kids didn't buy it, of course. I spooned some out into small plastic bags while explaining that it was a hydrophilic polymer I had used in the garden over the summer, it would dry back out into granules if left on a paper towel, and it was pretty much the same thing that they could find in a disposable diaper. This last bit of info really elicited some cries of "eeeewwwwww!"
Then we made Slime, using the directions in the old Girl Scout Junior Badge Book in the Making It Matter Badge; these are the best directions I've found for making Slime with a crowd of kids in 3rd through 5th grade. Of course, this badge book is no longer available because
Pass out cups to the kids, along with wooden popsicle sticks for stirring. Measure out 1 tablespoon of Elmer's Glue (or other glue -- there are lots of websites comparing the virtues of various glues in regards to Slime-making) into each cup (have kids help with this or not -- sort of depends on your crowd)to . Go down the row putting 3 tablespoons of water into each cup, and have them stir the water and glue together.
(For the record, all I had told them about what we were doing was that we were going to make a polymer by having using the Borax hook together the polyvinyl acetate [in the glue] sort of like paper clips hooking together lots of little chains. Some kids recognized what we were doing, most didn't. Several websites give nice explanations of the science of this demonstration, and thanks to Wikipedia I think I know the difference between polyvinyl acetate and polyvinyl alcohol.)
We then put a squirt of glow-in-the-dark paint in each cup.
Earlier I had mixed 2 tablespoons of Borax in a cup of warm water. Each cup of watery glue next got one tablespoon of the Borax solution, with directions to "keep stirring". Unfortunately as the water cooled a lot of the Borax precipitated out (I'd done this at home, and at least an hour had elapsed). So the first few cups had a few duds, as they didn't have enough Borax to start the reaction. But, wow, it was pretty cool when SURPRISE, Slime started to form in the cups that worked. Since we had plenty of cups, glue, and Borax solution, we started over on some of the duds.
We then discussed where we could go to see whether or not it would really glow in the dark -- I hadn't tried this out ahead of time and wasn't really sure. We all ran downstairs to a big room with no windows, and discovered, YES, we have glowing slime! I meant to give a quick lesson in how glow in the dark paint works, but it was lost in the excitement.
I had brought plastic bags for them to put there Slime in. So, take-home bags of Ghost Brains and Slime! Perfect Halloween science class!
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Co-op Science Week 9
Magnets!
I spent some time talking about whys of magnets -- why do magnets act the way they do (electrons), why can we magnetize certain metals temporarily (organize the atoms in, say, an iron screw by using another magnet or an electric current), why do compasses point north (Earth has a magnetic field).
Mostly, though, we played. I had some neodymium magnets I'd gotten at Hobby Lobby several months ago -- I'd gotten them for my refrigerator, frankly, so I can stick papers to it without having everything tumble off. They came in packs of 2 -- a red and a yellow -- about 2 inches by 1 inch by 1/4 inch thick. I've since figured out that they're encased in plastic because neodymium is brittle; also, the plastic keeps them from sticking together so tightly that they're impossible to pull apart (the plastic is slick enough to slide them apart). Who knows how big the encased magnets are -- they might be much smaller. Anyway, they're pretty powerful little goobers, and I have 4 total magnets. I went back to Hobby Lobby recently to get more to use in class, but they were out of this particular model.
The kids were enchanted by picking up wads of paperclips with them. Also, they're powerful enough to stick one on top of your hand and one underneath and have them stick together.
I'd taken in some iron drywall screws that we magnetized by stroking with the magnets. Drywall screws were the only thing I could find in our workbench that worked -- most of the nails we have are galvanized or elsewise coated. I put duct tape on the plastic of the neodymium magnets so it wouldn't be scraped off by the threads of the drywall screws. I explained theories of how to de-magnetize the screws, but, frankly, dropping them repeatedly didn't work, and in our classroom setting I didn't feel like messing around with heating them .
We also magnetized steel needles, taped them to small pieces of cork, and floated them in bowls of water to make our own compasses. We discussed that these didn't have the handy marker to show us which end is north, and how could we figure out which was which? (Using our knowledge of where the sun rises and sets, for example.) We also experimented a bit with making the compasses go wonky by exposing them to another magnetic field.
Then I got out another set of drywall screws which we wrapped in insulated copper wire like this, attaching to 9v batteries. I had the kids work in groups for this to make it easier to supervise.
At the beginning of class I'd put a full serving of Total cereal in the blender with some water, then put it in a plastic bag. I'd hoped to get the iron filings to separate out. They eventually did, but this demonstration works best for me if I set one of the neodymium magnets on it for a while, then wander off and forget about it for a long time (like, hours). At home I was able to get a dollar bill to react a bit to the magnet, but I wasn't able to in class. The kids were somewhat appalled at the news that some people put a dollar bill in a blender to do the same type of demo ("that's illegal to do that to a dollar bill!"). Our currency is printed with a magnetic ink, by the way, which is why this would work.
I couldn't find any iron filings to use to show the poles of the magnets. Somewhere in the house we have one of those old games where you move the iron filings on a picture to make a beard or hair, but, alas, I can't find it. It also would've been wicked cool to get some ferrofluid to play around with, but it wasn't in the budget.
Some of the kids seemed disinterested in the entire session. Perhaps they've done it all before; or perhaps the set up of just playing around and seeing what happened bothered them. I'd expected that most everyone in class has played some with magnets, but now I know they've all seen certain things that we can build on as we explore more about electromagnetic forces.
I spent some time talking about whys of magnets -- why do magnets act the way they do (electrons), why can we magnetize certain metals temporarily (organize the atoms in, say, an iron screw by using another magnet or an electric current), why do compasses point north (Earth has a magnetic field).
Mostly, though, we played. I had some neodymium magnets I'd gotten at Hobby Lobby several months ago -- I'd gotten them for my refrigerator, frankly, so I can stick papers to it without having everything tumble off. They came in packs of 2 -- a red and a yellow -- about 2 inches by 1 inch by 1/4 inch thick. I've since figured out that they're encased in plastic because neodymium is brittle; also, the plastic keeps them from sticking together so tightly that they're impossible to pull apart (the plastic is slick enough to slide them apart). Who knows how big the encased magnets are -- they might be much smaller. Anyway, they're pretty powerful little goobers, and I have 4 total magnets. I went back to Hobby Lobby recently to get more to use in class, but they were out of this particular model.
The kids were enchanted by picking up wads of paperclips with them. Also, they're powerful enough to stick one on top of your hand and one underneath and have them stick together.
I'd taken in some iron drywall screws that we magnetized by stroking with the magnets. Drywall screws were the only thing I could find in our workbench that worked -- most of the nails we have are galvanized or elsewise coated. I put duct tape on the plastic of the neodymium magnets so it wouldn't be scraped off by the threads of the drywall screws. I explained theories of how to de-magnetize the screws, but, frankly, dropping them repeatedly didn't work, and in our classroom setting I didn't feel like messing around with heating them .
We also magnetized steel needles, taped them to small pieces of cork, and floated them in bowls of water to make our own compasses. We discussed that these didn't have the handy marker to show us which end is north, and how could we figure out which was which? (Using our knowledge of where the sun rises and sets, for example.) We also experimented a bit with making the compasses go wonky by exposing them to another magnetic field.
Then I got out another set of drywall screws which we wrapped in insulated copper wire like this, attaching to 9v batteries. I had the kids work in groups for this to make it easier to supervise.
At the beginning of class I'd put a full serving of Total cereal in the blender with some water, then put it in a plastic bag. I'd hoped to get the iron filings to separate out. They eventually did, but this demonstration works best for me if I set one of the neodymium magnets on it for a while, then wander off and forget about it for a long time (like, hours). At home I was able to get a dollar bill to react a bit to the magnet, but I wasn't able to in class. The kids were somewhat appalled at the news that some people put a dollar bill in a blender to do the same type of demo ("that's illegal to do that to a dollar bill!"). Our currency is printed with a magnetic ink, by the way, which is why this would work.
I couldn't find any iron filings to use to show the poles of the magnets. Somewhere in the house we have one of those old games where you move the iron filings on a picture to make a beard or hair, but, alas, I can't find it. It also would've been wicked cool to get some ferrofluid to play around with, but it wasn't in the budget.
Some of the kids seemed disinterested in the entire session. Perhaps they've done it all before; or perhaps the set up of just playing around and seeing what happened bothered them. I'd expected that most everyone in class has played some with magnets, but now I know they've all seen certain things that we can build on as we explore more about electromagnetic forces.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Co-op Science Week 8
Friction.
Actually, we started out with a review of gravity from last week. I used some questions from Science Jim's Bite-Size Physics: Force like: Which of the following are most attracted to each other by gravity? A) apples and bananas, B)beagles and chihuahuas, C) Earth and you, or D)All of the above. Sort of mildly silly, but got the point across.
From there I asked who all had read or seen Magic School Bus Plays Ball, since we were talking about the same topic. Several kids had, but some hadn't. Some came up and looked through the book as we were doing our various activities.
We started by listing ways friction was a friend or foe (idea from Science Action Labs -- Physical Science). We discussed car brakes, crickets, violins, snakes, walking, standing, things that overheat due to friction, etc.
We then did an experiment with a board and various shoes, seeing how high we could incline the board before the shoes slid down the ramp. We talked about how shoes that had more points of contact with the board tended to have more friction.
Next, we tried pulling a heavy metal tray from my kitchen over various surfaces. I hooked a spring scale to the tray so we could see the force used. This also involved explaining Hooke's law about springs, plus what the heck a "Newton" is. Besides running the tray over the carpet, I had brought in a fluffy rug and a yoga mat. After that we ran it a few times over the same surface, but with different amounts of weight on top -- we used books the kids had in their backpacks.
I showed on the board how they could start writing a lab report for this experiment -- what they would write for their hypothesis, materials, procedure.
We took a brief look at bearings. First of all I stuck some pens under the tray while it sat on the yoga mat, and demonstrated how easily it moved on the pens. Then I set up a demo rather like this one (Annabeth and I had done this for a Junior Girl Scout badge back when Girl Scouts had cool badges worth earning). And discussed how the bearing gave the item fewer points of contact with the surface below, just like with the shoes. And, no, even though your grandpa puts grease on bearings doesn't mean that grease is a necessity for bearings to work.
I didn't do much explaining of the whys of friction, although I let the kids know that it's something scientists are still working to understand more about.
Finally, we explored air friction by making parachutes out of plastic grocery bags, taping them to little paper-cone-people. I had taken along drinking straws so we could shoot the people in the air, but since we were done a few minutes early we trooped outside, tossing them over the 2 story balcony on the way out to enjoy the last warm, sunny day of the week. It was really cool to watch them floating down like a bunch of gigantic baby spiders. Some of the kids were still playing with them on the playground, and one girl intended to show her little brother how to make one that evening.
I'd reflect on all of this more, but a rat keeps running across the keyboard, typing nonsense, so I'll leave it at that.
Actually, we started out with a review of gravity from last week. I used some questions from Science Jim's Bite-Size Physics: Force like: Which of the following are most attracted to each other by gravity? A) apples and bananas, B)beagles and chihuahuas, C) Earth and you, or D)All of the above. Sort of mildly silly, but got the point across.
From there I asked who all had read or seen Magic School Bus Plays Ball, since we were talking about the same topic. Several kids had, but some hadn't. Some came up and looked through the book as we were doing our various activities.
We started by listing ways friction was a friend or foe (idea from Science Action Labs -- Physical Science). We discussed car brakes, crickets, violins, snakes, walking, standing, things that overheat due to friction, etc.
We then did an experiment with a board and various shoes, seeing how high we could incline the board before the shoes slid down the ramp. We talked about how shoes that had more points of contact with the board tended to have more friction.
Next, we tried pulling a heavy metal tray from my kitchen over various surfaces. I hooked a spring scale to the tray so we could see the force used. This also involved explaining Hooke's law about springs, plus what the heck a "Newton" is. Besides running the tray over the carpet, I had brought in a fluffy rug and a yoga mat. After that we ran it a few times over the same surface, but with different amounts of weight on top -- we used books the kids had in their backpacks.
I showed on the board how they could start writing a lab report for this experiment -- what they would write for their hypothesis, materials, procedure.
We took a brief look at bearings. First of all I stuck some pens under the tray while it sat on the yoga mat, and demonstrated how easily it moved on the pens. Then I set up a demo rather like this one (Annabeth and I had done this for a Junior Girl Scout badge back when Girl Scouts had cool badges worth earning). And discussed how the bearing gave the item fewer points of contact with the surface below, just like with the shoes. And, no, even though your grandpa puts grease on bearings doesn't mean that grease is a necessity for bearings to work.
I didn't do much explaining of the whys of friction, although I let the kids know that it's something scientists are still working to understand more about.
Finally, we explored air friction by making parachutes out of plastic grocery bags, taping them to little paper-cone-people. I had taken along drinking straws so we could shoot the people in the air, but since we were done a few minutes early we trooped outside, tossing them over the 2 story balcony on the way out to enjoy the last warm, sunny day of the week. It was really cool to watch them floating down like a bunch of gigantic baby spiders. Some of the kids were still playing with them on the playground, and one girl intended to show her little brother how to make one that evening.
I'd reflect on all of this more, but a rat keeps running across the keyboard, typing nonsense, so I'll leave it at that.
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