Abuzz with Activities

First of all, I hope each of you had a blessed Thanksgiving! We've been busy these past couple of weeks with experiments, investigations, and engineering activities. The week prior to the holiday, we did several Thanksgiving themed experiments. Here are a few pictures and explanations of some of them. Discuss these with your child at home!
First, we placed corn in a container of water on the window ledge to see what would happen. This was a learning experience because we had to stray from the materials listed. It stated to use "indian corn" but surprisingly no stores in the BS/Sptbg area had indian corn (what?!). I guess they clear that out after Halloween to make room for Christmas merchandise. So unfortunately, we didn't observe too many changes but it led to a discussion about what would happen if we actually had used indian corn.
Next, we did an activity called "Pass the Cake" where we used apple, lemon, and chocolate cake. The students had to close their eyes and only use their sense of smell, touch (with tongue), and taste to predict what they were eating. Their favorite part was feeding their partner! We then graphed the correct and incorrect predictions. The trickiest flavor to predict seemed to be the lemon.

Another activity was "Shake it Up" in which they had to predict what would happen if we shook cold cream in a cold jar. Some of the predictions were it "would explode," "turn to sour cream," "turn to butter," or "do nothing." After a lot of vigorous shaking we had....BUTTER! We discussed how it had changed from a liquid to a solid because the fat particles were sticking together from all of the shaking. Then we tasted our creation on pieces of bread. They were surprised that they actually liked it!

And I save the best for last...."Boat Builders." The challenge was to build the Mayflower using only modeling clay, that could float and safely hold Pilgrims (10 marshmallows), livestock (tootsie rolls), and cargo (pennies). It was wonderful watching this engineering activity in progress. I was so proud of them for not giving up. Those groups that struggled got frustrated but kept trying. What a wonderful life lesson! And they were so proud when they achieved their goal. We had a great discussion too about creating, trying, and revisiting different aspects of the activity and what we had learned from it. This was a great learning experience and I look forward to the future activities and challenges we attempt as a class!