This morning students continued our exploration of liquids by exploring surface tension and cohesion. Students learned that some liquids, like water, have a strong surface tension that allows some items that would normally sink to rest on top of the water.
Surface tension allows pepper to float on the top of water, but when we the surface of water is touched by a soapy finger the pepper is expelled to the edges of the plate.
The strong bonds of the water molecules at the surface allows us to over fill the glass.
Students replicated this result by using an eye dropper to drop beads of water onto a penny.
We followed this up by dragging beads of water across a piece of wax paper with a toothpick. We could drag them along and form bigger beads of water.
In math, we looked at the difference between guessing and estimation. Students were asked which of our 4 pumpkins was going to have the most seeds inside. Most students picked the one we had already determined which one was the biggest - pumpkin A. When asked why, most students explained that the biggest pumpkin should have the most seeds. Students were then shown a small cup and a large cup of beads and asked which one had the most beans inside. Most picked the largest cup for the same reason. However, when we looked inside the cup we saw that the small cup was full and the large cup was empty. We learned that estimations are rough judgements of a quantity based on observation. Students then worked in pairs to estimate beans or beads in a cup and then they checked how close they were by counting them. Students in grade one worked with items up to 30 and students in grade two worked with items up to 150.
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