Would Columbus Sail on That Ship??

In honor of Columbus Day, students were given various materials and asked to create a boat they thought Columbus would be willing to sail on. (Read: a boat that would float and stay upright rather than tip over or sink when placed in water.)

Students were able to use fabric, buttons, toothpicks, corks, feathers, paper, and aluminum foil.  

Once students explored the materials and created boats, everyone tested their boat in a bucket of water.

On the initial test, we had five students who created boats that floated without tipping over. 

Observing what the five boats had in common, students were able to go back and create a new boat to try again. By the end of the lesson, all students had figured out that corks tipped on the side provided the stability necessary for a floating boat!

Science!

Since we have a full 30 minutes of Science in our schedule every day this year, I wanted it to really be a fun time for the kiddos.  I introduced it by asking "What is Science?" I got responses like "Science is doing work." "Science is writing." "Science is learning." And while all of these are true things that science can be, no one said SCIENCE IS FUN! SCIENCE IS EXPLORING! SCIENCE IS MAKING COOL STUFF! SCIENCE IS OBSERVING OTHER COOL STUFF! I went ahead and followed up their initial comments with my own.  When they saw how excited I was about science, (to include "SCIENCE IS EXPLOSIONS!") they all cheered and clapped.

We tried to figure out what was in the mystery bag to work on our observation and inference skills.

On another day, we had our first science experiment! We walked through the steps of the scientific method, asking a question: "What will happen if I mix all these ingredients together?"

Making a hypothesis: "It will make a rainbow." "It will make some food we can eat(!)" "It will make some pink water." 

Testing our hypothesis: time to mix!

Recording our observations:

"It looks like strawberry milk!"  "It's slimy!" "It's sticky!" "WHAT IS HAPPENING!!?!?!!"

And, finally, drawing a conclusion:

If we mix water, glue, food coloring and borax, we'll get SLIME!

This week, we've learned about the five senses. We had to solve a challenge using all five of our senses! The labels were missing on our bags of salt and sugar. We had to figure out which one was which!

We smelled them both.

We felt them both.

We tasted them both.

We also looked at and listened to them both (when shaken).

When we realized that taste helped us more than anything else, we discovered which was which.

And we wanted to taste the sugar one more time.

Thanks to our hard investigative work, we were able to properly label both bags. :)