Once again we had our Science Friday. It really is a lot easier to do Science once a week in a two to three hours block instead of trying to take out and put away all that stuff several times a week. And there’s a nice flow to the day, too. I wonder why it took my so long to figure this out.
We concentrated today on the magnetic fields and magnetic force. We did a couple of explorations with stuff here. First, the students had the opportunity to simply experiment with magnets in different ways. There’s something about magnets which is, well, just magnetic!
We then concentrated on seeing how a magnetic force could travel through iron. Students figured out how many objects could be daisy-chained from a magnet, and how adding and subtracting magnets changed the total amount of magnetic force available.
After each exploration, we took time to discuss what we saw, add to our Science Concepts chart, and record some of our results and observation in our Science notebook.
That took us up to about lunch time. We were inside for lunch because of the rain (cheering students, groaning teacher). Then after lunch we used balances to explore how much weight was needed to break magnetic fields apart. This was fun!
Students inserted small poker chips (the program called them “spacers” so we did not suggest gambling to the young ones) in between the magnets to see how the non-metallic objects would weaken the magnetic attraction. They put their results on a T-chart and then graphed them. One student looked at me and said, “You’re trying to sneak in some math here!” Ah, the devious teacher mind….
Along with all this wonderful Science, we also started a research project, checked our homework, went to the library, and took a spelling test. We were also scheduled to have a fire drill, thanks to the rain that was cancelled!
Homework: (1) Do “Checking Quotients,” Math, pages 284-287. (2) Do Problem Solving, Math pages 288-289.
A few students may still be finishing the first draft of the new I-search paper, but most did that during the morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment