This week’s students continued developing the all important process skill of observing and inferring through the scientific method.  After our drops on a penny lab, students were asked what are some factors that could affect the number of drops on a penny.  This was a perfect segue into variables.  Many students came up with

  • Changing the type of coin
  • Changing the type of liquid
  • Changing the temperature of water
  • Using different liquids with different thicknesses (water, vegetable oil, karo syrup)

We decided to test the type of liquid and compared soapy water to clean water.  The students made their hypothesis (many thought the soapy water would take less drops because it is slippery).  They were pretty excited to see that their observations matched their hypothesis.  They observed that the soapy water spread out instead of forming round droplets like the clean water.  The Gobstopper Lab gave us more practice with observations and variables-manipulated, responding, and controls.  This week we also talked about OBSERVATIONS being the most important tool of a a scientist.  Students learned that their are two types of observations QUAN and QUAL.  We learned that Quan like NUMBERS

and QUALitative like words/letters. We also introduced inference with the MYSTERY FOOTPRINTS activity.  As expected student immediately want to make a their INFERENCE their OBSERVATION.   As always this will be a major area that students struggle with.  The kids were also quite amazed at the OPTICAL ILLUSIONS and learned that we can’t always TRUST our eyes.  The one we looked at was the Old Woman or the Young Woman and the Native American or the Eskimo.  This was the perfect lead into to talking about quantitative measurements using the metric system.  This week we will focus on the METRIC system and learn how scientist measure length, volume, mass, temperature, and time

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