Friday, May 20, 2011

5.11.11: an "egg"cellent day!

Some may color me crazy, but I engaged us in a super involved activity today to explore the effects of gravity and how we work against it...we made parachutes for eggs!!  Ahhhhh!!!!

After some math practice with telling time (on analog clocks!) and actually figuring out how many seconds there are in a day (86,400), week (604,800), and year (31,536,00), and then how many minutes and hours there are in a year (525,600 minutes & 8,760 hours), we got started on our Science activity/ experiment that took the remainder of the morning.

We are learning about force & motion on Earth and before we can learn about simple machines, we must understand that gravity is the greatest force as it is what keeps us and everything else grounded.  The Earth pulls all objects on its surface towards the center.  Our weight is actually our gravitational pull towards our planet.  Thus, we must study how things are able to fly or how things are able to survive after being in air (sky divers, planes, birds, etc.).  Science is all about discovery learning and this activity was no exception to that.  After discussing the focus of the activity, the students were set free in their groups to figure out how to get an egg to land safely on the ground, without breaking, after dropping it from many feet off the ground.  They were to make an egg parachute!  3 of the 6 groups were able to successfully master it by recess!  Below you can see pictures from the process and some of the videos of the trials.  Students worked completely through discovery, without any direction from me, as they had to figure out what went wrong and/ or right with each trial.  It really was exhilarating to see the students figure out the situation on their own...they're smart little cookies!




















HOMEWORK: Visit these websites tonight to view powerpoints about Force and Motion and play games addressing the skills!











I hope you have a Wonderful Wednesday evening!  I'm so proud of everyone today!

xoxo,

Mrs. Thomas


almost finished!  the leaves ALL have information and facts about baby owls!
PS, check this out!  Micah's reward for her most recent fill up of stars on her "Earn & Reward" card was to make a bulletin board about anything of her choice.  She had Caroline helping her as they created the cutest and most wonderful board about baby owls!  It is absolutely fantastic!






"Whoooooooo Baby"!


Micah and her Daddy :)

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