Good morning!
This post is going to be short and to the point. We just wanted to share our Flying Cup Part 2 experiment. Our students were super excited and engaged, once again, each afternoon last week. Even when they were synthesizing their results from part 1 and part 2, as well as what they learned about forces, gravity and mass, to draw a conclusion about why their cup landed the way it did. The discussions were lively and rich. We wish we you could have heard them.
After discovering that the cup landed mostly on its side in part 1, the new challenge was to get the cup to mostly land on its top or bottom. They only materials they could use were pennies (no more than 10) and something to attach the pennies to the cup. They all chose masking tape; however, they could have chosen liquid glue, hot glue, scotch tape, duct tape, electrical tape, or pipe cleaners.
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| The set-up |
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| Scientific method written in science notebooks |
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| Group data |
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| One group's design |
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| Analyzing results to draw a conclusion and wrote a reflection. This was a guided lesson because of the rigor of the writing task. |
Only one team's cup landed mostly on its side. They concluded, with the help of the class, that it was because they put the pennies around both the top outside rim and the bottom outside rim of the cup. This added even more mass to the already heavy side of the cup. Therefore, that is where it mostly landed. Other groups loaded up the very bottom of the cup or the very top of the cup with pennies. Since that allowed the top or bottom of the cup to have the most mass, that is where the cup landed mostly.
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| This group's landed mostly on its side, however they had a great argument for why they thought this would meet the challenge. They thought putting the mass at both ends would guarantee that it land on either the top or bottom. |
Not only did the reading on hyper doc assist in our students' learning, the Study Jam videos in this hyper doc did, as well. The first and last videos were the most relevant to our lessons and experiments. In fact, one student went home and wrote another journal entry with diagrams and labels about forces, acceleration and mass. His mother was so impressed. We are waiting for permission to share that entry with you. Receiving that email early this morning made our Sunday even more special than it normal.
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| Next lesson--apply the concepts of force and motion and gravity and friction to robotics. |
Another fun activity we did this week was our geometry reindeer. This lesson was created by Amy Lemons. You can find it on teachers pay teachers. We wanted to take a break from 2-step problem solving and the distributive property in math.
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| Filled with activities. |
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| One of our favorite activities and displays for the season. |
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| She has a TpT store, too. |
We did not get to our scarecrow activities. That will begin on Monday, so hopefully we will have pictures to share next weekend, in addition our snowman stretch pictures. We are also in the middle of our Anansi the Spider cinquains. We will share those activities along with a Christmas Spider legend and ornament next weekend.
Once again, we cannot wait to get back to school on Monday to dive into the fun activities we have planned for the kids.
Have a super week... only a few left before winter break.
Kim and Anne
PS: We began our morning warm-ups with these December Welcome Messages created by The Curriculum Corner. The best part about them were the quotes at the top of the page. Anne and I are trying so hard to convince the kids that mistakes and failures are good because it means they are learning something new, and the quotes this week happened to reinforce those messages from us. check them out!
