Science

Since winter break, the third/fourth grade class has been focused on gearing up for science fair as well as exploring space.

To really sink our teeth into the practice of designing an experiment the students conducted a few simple investigations to gain skills in asking testable questions as well as collecting data and creating graphs. Students worked in groups to compare bouncy balls and ping pong balls with a testable question of their choice - most did something comparing number of bounces, bounce height or speed and distance down a ramp. All needed to conduct multiple trials and graph their results in their notebooks. Next students made paper airplanes and added weight in the form of pennies to see how weight affected flight distance. Depending on the design of the plane, some students found that a few pennies actually helped their plane fly further. The final experiment practice was when the students collected data to determine if when playing the same opponent in "Rock, Paper, Scissors" is there a hand signal to throw that statistically wins more often. The jury is still out on this one - it looked like overall "rock" was most likely to win, but many individual groups found other answers in a sample size of ten matches. We also talked about inventions and looked at different examples of famous and not so famous inventions that were created by kids. 

Inspired by the super/blue/blood moon the third/fourth class has also spent some time comparing the planets and chipping away at a massive list of questions we generated that we want to know the answers to about space. Students used clay to make either circles or spheres showing the relative diameters of the planets (Jupiter is huge!) and we collected data for ourselves of jumping forward, jumping vertically, and throwing a ball straight up in the air and with the magic of math determined how our abilities would change on other planets (since all are based on gravity). 

Science fair is scheduled for March 22nd! Students have been busy at least once a week in class working on their questions, their background research, their experiment procedure, and variables. Currently, they should be ready to conduct their experiment (and record results) or build their inventions (and keep an inventor's log) at home. Thank you all for your support in this!

Bouncy ball vs ping pong ball investigations.

Testing the cargo capacity of paper airplanes.

Making clay planetary models.

Testing "black hole" simulators.