Science Ideas for 12/14/2015

Holiday / Snow Day Edition. Big idea this week: give the gift of science. If you value this post, and you have a teacher friend at another school, forward this to them. I’d love to expand its reach. A bigger audience means more ideas.

Kindergarten: Off the pacing map, but what could be more appropriate than Weather! Does weather affect our daily lives? Hmmm… Also, turn it into a measuring activity as the day goes on. More snow should fall today and even tomorrow, so go stick a ruler out there, or alternative units. Better yet, measure it a few units at once. Or throw it out as a design challenge: how should we measure how much snow has fallen? You could do the same with a snowball, but in reverse. Make a big snowball, bring it inside, maybe in a bowl or bucket, stick a ruler in it, and chart its melting. You could compare the melting rates of compacted snow vs. uncompacted. Get two bowls, one with light scooped snow, and the other stuffed with snow. I’m always looking for ways to introduce measurement / graphing, and they’ll certainly be interested in how much snow is falling outside…

1st: We got a great result with our “light painting” idea. This was a basketball bouncing, with an LED taped to it. It took a few tries, but we felt that the kids understood the motion of the ball in a new way after this visualization. We’d also like to test swinging the light on a string for back and forth, and maybe taping it to a football for a zigzag patten.

2nd: Think about stars this week, and constellations. This one is always a bit tricky, because it’s a little hard to see the stars during the day. Great conversation: Where do they go during the day? If they need any help with this one, shine a dim flashlight at them or the board while the lights are on. Then turn the lights off, and ask them to notice how bright it seems. Helps them understand why we can’t see the stars during the day. Same thing with your smartboard projector – a dark room makes it seem brighter.

3rd: This week, let’s take this indicator: “Show that objects at rest will not move unless a force is applied to them.” This is intuitive, and not that exciting by itself. Let me tell you what gets my blood pumping about Newtonian physics: that a body in motion will stay in motion until acted on by another force. Same exact principal as being at rest, but this one is counter intuitive. Why? Because there is a lot of friction here on Earth, so everything we see will slow down, once the force disappears. Stop pedaling your bike, and eventually you’ll fall over. So we want to find something with super low friction, that will keep moving long after the force has stopped pushing. The best thing I’ve found so far: a bowling ball. I bought one at the DI for $3, and if you give it a gentle push, it’ll roll about 60 feet down the hall. It’s weird – it just keeps going. This is because it has a lot of mass, and a very low rolling resistance. Thus very low friction. So kids can start to understand that if there was NO friction, it would keep on rolling forever. Unless another force comes along. Now we can start to appreciate why objects being at rest is so interesting. Let me know when I can show up to your class with my bowling ball – it’ll take just 15 minutes.

4th: Fossils. Lots of great stuff here, and you probably have your own lessons that you love. Random big idea: the shallow ocean that used to cover Utah hundreds of millions of years ago was not Lake Bonneville. Bonneville was more in the 15,000 – 30,000 year ago range, which sounds like a long time ago. But it isn’t, geologically speaking. If the Earth’s existence was a timeline 100 feet long, the ancient ocean stuff happened about 8 feet from today. Bonneville would be a fraction of an inch from the end. Trilobites did not come from Lake Bonneville. Check out think link for a little more info:

http://geology.utah.gov/popular/general-geology/geologic-history/utah-a-geologic-history/ 

I do the “toilet paper timeline” with 5th grade, but consider doing a condensed version of that in 4th to help them understand the timescales of fossils, the rock cycle, and weathering and erosion.

http://www.nthelp.com/eer/HOAtimetp.html 

5th: I dare someone to make circuits from play doh. It totally works.
This is a “squishy circuit” and many folks are using home-made play doh, but commercial works too. Use a 9v battery, because the play doh has a much higher resistance (which is to say it’s not as good a conductor) compared to copper wire. Usually, a 9v battery will smoke any little lightbulbs / LEDs you’ve got, but with the play doh it works great. See this TED talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/annmarie_thomas_squishy_circuits?language=en

 If you need LEDs, get in touch.

6th: We’re approaching the Solstice – December 22nd. Look at a data table, such as this one:

http://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/salt-lake-city

See what the kids notice about the times of the sunrise / sunset. Also the length of day. The sun actually continues to rise a little later in the morning, but you can clearly see the length of day as the shortest on the Solstice. They can also notice that those sunset/sunrise times continue to change by about 1 minute (a little less) per day. Interesting patterns.

Here is a very cool video from the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The guy set up a camera on the roof, and took a time-lapse video every day for a year. Then he put all 365 vids together into one video, and synched up the times. What a cool way too use technology to observe something that’s otherwise subtle and hard to visualize. You can get the idea from the first minute or so, then skip to about 3:30 to see it all in reverse. Notice the weather variations throughout the year from the cloud cover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNln_me-XjI

 Enjoy the holiday! If anyone tells you that physicists have calculated that Santa cannot exist because he’d have to travel so fast he’d burn up in the atmosphere, tell them he obviously has an ion shield. More here: http://phys.org/news/2004-12-physics-santa-claus.html

Science Ideas for 12/7/2015

Big Idea – Data.  How can your science explorations and activities generate data, either qualitative or quantitative? 

Kindergarten – Living Things. Here’s an Indicator: “Construct questions, give reasons, and share findings about all living things.”  You can do a lot here, so for right now you can be thinking about hibernation.  Unrelated to this standard, but appropriate for the season: it’s a perfect time for an engineering challenge!  If you’re covering the Gingerbread Man  Check this out: 

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Gingerbread-Man-Trap-Engineering-Challenge-Project-Great-STEM-Activity-982948

1^st – Movement of Nonliving Things.  Look at this indicator: “Compare and contrast the movement of objects using drawings, graphs, and numbers.”   Here’s a really neat project from Ms. Salas’ classroom, which we originally found on Pinterest.  They made marble mazes with the edges of paper plates.  After construction, you could time how long each maze takes to run, and graph the results as a class.   Super fun for the Motion of Objects.

2^nd – Night Sky and Weather.   Here’s the indicator: “Observe, describe, and record patterns in the appearance and apparent motion of the moon in the night sky. “ We want kids to understand that the moon moves across the sky throughout the day, very similar to the sun.  We also want them to see how its position also changes day over day, rising and setting at slightly different times every day. 

Ms. Soria and I have been playing around with a device that might prove interesting to you – I’m calling it a moon observation stick. Pick a place outside where you can affix a pole or stick to another object.  It’s okay to take it inside between observations, as long as you can get it set up exactly the same each time.  The idea is that we’ll use a soda straws to sight in on the moon.  Imagine pointing a telescope at something - the next person can walk up and see what you just saw.  While sighting the moon through the straw, tape that straw into place on the stick.  Now we have a fixed reference point in an otherwise blank sky, so if the moon moves a little, we can tell.  We won’t be able to see it any more through the straw.  We could aim a new straw at its new location.  Which is exactly what we’re going to do.  Here’s our prototype rig below, with just one straw taped to it so far.  The thumb tack in the picture is coincidentally roughly where the moon was when we had it outside.

Come back in an hour, and tape a new straw to your rig.  Repeat at regular intervals throughout the day.  Maybe once an hour. You should end up with a sort of fan shape of straws, all pointing to different spots in the sky, along the path of the moon.  And if you look through them one by one, you can visualize where the moon was at different times.

If you enjoyed that, now visit the same place outside at the same time for a week.  This is the same idea, but now you’re observing how the moon moves day over day.  It’s important to go at the same time every day, otherwise the pattern you observe won’t seem consistent.  Very fun stuff! 

This could work OK this week, but better next week.  We'll have a new moon on Friday, so it'll wax (get bigger) from there.  Next Monday, the moon will rise at 10:00 AM and set at 8:40 PM, just to give you a reference.  Find all that information here: http://www.timeanddate.com/moon/usa/salt-lake-city

As always, feel free to ask for any clarification.

3rd - Here's a simple idea for simple machines.  Get a smooth pencil, and drape yarn over it.  Tie the yard to something with a little weight, like a pair of scissors.  Lift the scissors with the string - you have a pulley.  You've changed the direction of the force - a downward pull becomes an upward lift.  Now, get two pencils.  Here's the hard part.  tie one end of the yarn to one of the pencils.  See photo.  Wind the yarn around the pencils a few times.  Now one kid holds both pencils, and the other pulls the string.  Notice how much string needs to be pulled to move the pencils.  You have to pull a long distance to get a big force.  For this one, since the string is wrapped 7x, you’d need to pull seven inches of string through to move the pencils one inch.  But you’d get seven times the force!  (Minus friction but don’t get into that too much right now…) Feel how much force is exerted on those pencils.  Notice how hard you have to push to "separate" the pencils, but how quickly it reels in the string.  So when we apply a lot of force, we get movement over a lot of distance.  Keep talking about those trade-offs!

4th – This one from Barb Rogers.  Misconception: metamorphic rocks have layers.  Let’s get away from this terminology.  Instead, what we’re usually seeing is banding – when the original rocks are undergoing metamorphosis, the minerals inside can reform into bands.  (Occasionally, we can still observe the original bedding layers in a metamorphic rock, like a sandstone that turned into quartzite, but that usually not what we’re seeing when kids notice the banding.)  It’s a different mechanism than the formation of layers in sedimentary rocks, and understanding that process helps kids understand the story of metamorphic rocks.

 I’ll add another strategy tip, which is teaching rock classification into igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks by how they were formed, as opposed to how they look.  The rock’s physical characteristics give us evidence on how those rocks were formed, but the evidence itself does not make it one type of rock, or another.  It’s a fine distinction, but I think it’s an important one.  Think about geology as a story, as a series of events.

5th -  A few last details for electricity.  This is a great time to circle back to electro magnets, and talk about circuits within the context of building them.  We need the kids to know that the more winds of wire, the stronger the magnet.  Here’s a bit of an exploration, if you’re curious: can we make an electromagnet without a nail or a bolt on the inside?  Using a soda straw, or pen tube for example?  (Hint: we sure can!) What would happen to its strength if we did that?

 6th - Once again, see 2nd for overlapping ideas on the moon.  Here's your indicator: "Compare how objects in the sky (the moon, planets, stars) change in relative position over the course of the day or night."

I'll emphasize the fact that we can observe the moon during the day. As teachers, it's all we've got.  I'd have the 6th graders all design and build their own rigs for tracking the moon.  They might use soda straws, or some other method for showing how it moves across the sky.  It might also help them observe the changes in its appearance.