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. |
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