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.