At the beginning of this wood unit, the 3 K teachers got together and thought, "how can we take all that we have learned about wood, and make a final project?" We have talked about sinking and floating, properties of wood, how to join pieces of wood together, and how to change wood into something new. The logical thing that came to mind was... MAKING BOATS! At the end of the week, we watched a few videos of possible ways to make a floating boat and then dove in! What a fun way to end the week :) |
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What do we do with all that sawdust? Make particleboard of course! We know that not all types of wood are solid wood. We set out to investigate how we could make our own particleboard. We tried mixing sawdust and wood shavings with water, but found out that water was not strong enough to hold the pieces together. It did however make wood pulp! Next step in making particleboard is GLUE! Before class, I made a special cornstarch matrix to act as the glue holding the sawdust and wood shavings together. We worked hard to mix it all together and make out own chunk of particleboard! We left if overnight to dry.
A messy week on investigation how wood interacts with water! We started the week of small by seeing what happened when we put a few drops of water on different samples of wood. Did the wood absorb or repel the water? Did all the types of wood do the same thing? We moved on from drops of water, to buckets! Our next goal was to investigate sinking and floating. We started by finding things around the classroom to test whether they would sink or float (marbles, words from the word wall, math manipulatives, shapes, ect) We found out that not all things that are big sink, and not all things that are small float! Some of us were surprised at the end to see that wood floats!! Now that we know that wood floats, how can we make it sink!!! We tried putting blocks on top of it, magnatiles, taping things to it, nothing worked. We needed a way to stick the heavy materials onto the wood so that they wouldn't fall off. Alas, rubber bands came into play. We used rubber bands and paperclips to see if we could make pieces of Pine and Plywood sink. Now that we figured out a method that sink the wood, we needed to conduct a more structured investigation to see what the least amount of paperclips were needed to sink two different kinds of wood. This investigation was more systematic and we had to accurately record our findings.
When you think about studying wood after studying living things, you might think it would be a let down. Initially, I thought so too. But don't you worry the K team has spiced up the wood unit and added our own unique style to make it just as fun. Juts think wood shop 2.0 kindergarten style. The safety glasses and hammers will be coming out :) The main concepts of the unit are:
- There are different types of wood and paper with properties that are similar and different from each other - Different woods and papers have properties that cause them to interact with water and other materials in different ways - Wood and paper can by physically changes, and when it is changed, it may have different properties. - Some wood products are manufactures from smaller wood materials - Wood and paper can be transformed into useful and artistic products. The new earthworms made quite an impression this week! We noticed right away that these worms are a lot bigger and you can see all of their parts more clearly. When they move, their heads become flat when they stretch! Isopods are our last animal that we will be studying with this science unit and man o' man are they fascinating! here are some fun facts about these creatures
- Isopods are crustaceans. They are closely related to lobsters, crayfish, and crabs. - Like crustaceans, their bodies have an exoskeleton made of overlapping plates. The isopods have 7 plates. - Isopods get oxygen mostly from their gills. The gills must be moist for the isopods to breathe. - Wood is their main food source. They seek a dark, moist environment. - Sowbugs and pill bugs have a similar structure, with a few slight differences. Sowbugs antennae have 3 segments, while pill bugs have 2. The carapace (body) of the sowbug is flat and the pillbug is rounder and smoother. We conducted our second fair test with the snails and this time they were a little more active for us! The question we were investigating was, do snails prefer rough or smooth surfaces? We had sand paper, wax paper, a tray, and a snail as our materials. Since our snails weren't very active last time, we decided to put them closer to the materials this time :)
Animals 2x2: FISHWe learned the difference between and illustration and a scientific diagram by simply drawing a fish to show someone who hadn't seen one before and then the next day drawing a fish like a scientist and labeling all of it's parts. Once we knew about all of the fish's structures or parts, we learned about the functions of those parts. We continued to dive into what we think we know about Goldfish and what we still want to know. When they FINALLY arrived on Thursday, we spent a lot of time observing our goldfish, noticing how they behaved when we added food and Elodea to their tanks. To get the kids to start thinking about how external things change behavior, I did a little experiment. We put a big "x" of tape on the door before they came into school. When they walked in, we watched to see what they would do. Would they stop, go under it, break it? I soon noticed a group of kids standing outside the door, not sure what to do. Soon enough, kids started ducking under the tape and going inside. Our next question became, are the fish going to act the same way when new items are added to the tank? We made predictions and recorded our observations with pictures and words.
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