Happy Earth Day!!

Each year, our school celebrates EARTH DAY with fun rotations! Here's a peek at what we did today:

Paper Towel Rainstick

Recycled Relays

 Recycle Speaker

Story Time & Snack

Peel Crayons to Make New Crayons

Book Swap

 Pavers (each grade made one for our outdoor area)

Disappearing Peeps!

Welcome!! We are experimenting on the effects of various liquids on Peeps! We are testing water, vinegar, apple juice, soda, and laundry detergent. The students are recording the changes they see each day.

Day One

Day Two

almost completely gone!

Egg Drop

Each of my students created an invention to protect a raw egg from a 9 foot drop. They were SUCH creative little kiddos! In an unprecedented turn of events, all but one egg survived the fall. This has SERIOUSLY NEVER happened before in six years of teaching!

Check out some of their projects:

Eggs Full of Sound

Along with our other sound science experiment, we got to shake it up with some eggs. The students shook eggs and had to figure out what objects were inside. No matching this time, just hard listening. The students glued down the object pictures they thought were in the eggs. This was such a fun experiment for the students! They worked really hard to match the sounds to what the objects in the pictures were made of. The most fun was opening the eggs to see if they were correct!

Sound Cups of Science

Sound isn't always very exciting. But I wanted to make sure my students were really understanding that different objects create different noises. In this experiment, there are sixteen (yogurt) cups with eight different objects. There are eight matches the students try to find as they are shaking them. They use their chart to describe the sound and then try to find the matches. They loved trying to see how good their ears were!

Diaper Science!

You can have fun and learn at the same time! Case in point, break out a package of diapers in front of a class of 3rd graders ;)

I found this science experiment while searching the internet for a fun, one day experiment that my students would be able to the bulk of on their own. We wanted our 3rd graders to go through the scientific process with more responsibility. Many of the science experiments we have done have completed we the students observing while I (and some volunteers) do the experiment or it is too difficult to get enough materials for more than one experiment can be done at once. I was so happy to find this simple and fun experiment!

After the rolls of giggling and tears of laughter over having diapers in our classroom, we got down to business. We determined our question to be "How much liquid (in mL) can a diaper hold?". Before materials were distributed, the students made their hypothesis of how much water the diaper would hold. The students were split into groups of 3 or 4 and given a diaper, recording sheet, a graduated cylinder, and water (dyed blue so we could see it better). The students added water in 25 mL increments and tallied as the water was added.

We determined that the diapers were "full" when they were no longer dry to the touch. The amount of water held varied from group to group, with totals ranging from 225-325 mL. We discussed why diapers needed to hold so much liquid (cue more giggling and howls of laughter). This was such a fun experiment and will definitely be one we do again next year!!

Note: My students suggested we do the experiment again, but with different types of diapers. That might get a bit expensive, but a great idea!

Diapers are so much FUN!!