Megan - Elementary Science Blog

 This week we got to investigate plungers/suction cups and ice melting on metal and wood.  We got to dicsuss with our table partners about how the paritcles move in pushing a plunger down. It was really interesting because we never talked about this as young students and I think that it was cool to work off each other ideas of how it works. When the plunger is pushed down, air is pushed out of inside the plunger which causes there to be more space for the particles to move around which causes the suction. Another thing we discussed was the idea of ice melting. We learned on the side about how metal and wood work with conducting heat. Metal is a good conducter because the particles are placed so closley together, while when you look at wood under a microscope, there are many holes in it, so there is more air which causes it to be a worse conducter of heat. Learning this and also learning about the two layers of the water bottle were really interesting. I think that this wold be...

 This week was really interesting to me. We got to really dive deep into the M&M experiment we tried last week and got to change different variables. It was also interesting to hear about the other tables because we all got to experiment with different ideas and use different ways to find them. One thing that I learned was the capture of the water influenced how fast the colors bled. Overall, the orange M&M bled the fastest while the blue bled the slowest. It was also interesting to see that the sugar water made the colors bleed very slowly and contained around the M&M, while the waters with no sugar bled and spread. Overall, I thought this activity was really fun and interesting to complete and think about. I think this would be a great activity to complete in an elementary classroom to get them to start thinking about ideas like this one. 

 In the class, we got to learn different ideas about an object. We had to determine the weight of the object sunk or floated, if it was a conductor of electricity, and more. The difference was that there was one normal object length, and the other was cut in half. Seeing this and the hypothesis before we tested the different objects was exciting. I think that this would be a great experment to do in class when learning about hte difference between mass and weight of an object. It was also very fun to do this hands-on and I think any hands-on activity in class gets the studetns more invloved in what we are learning that day and in the lab itself. 

 During this week's class, we got to explore many different hands-on labs. The main point of this activity was to discover the why. Many young students want to know why, but we don't know how to explain it. We can understand what is happening and why it's happening, but how do you explain this to someone who doesn't understand. I think that this was a really interesting way to explore this idea. We discovered so many different things during this activity. The most interesting one was the baking soda and vinegar. We knew as older students what was going to happen, but we were not sure how it happened. I think that doing these experiment help us learn how to teach ideas like these, but also can help students in the classroom ask question and be curious during experienmenting. Asking question is a good way for studetns to learn and start to understand they why of things happening. Here is two of the different acitivites that we did!   Ice melting ^^^ Plunger Push ^^^