Water, Water, Everywhere: part 2

Today we played with the ideas of liquid water and ice.  If we try to weigh liquid water balloons and frozen water balloons, which weighs more?  And how will we know?

Pippa, Alexis, and Tai thought that the ice would make the scale "go down lower."  Jeffery, Orin and Pauline thought that that water balloons weighed more.  Each child had their own balloons, and 4 out of 6 times the water balloons weighed more than the frozen balloons.  We concluded that since I did not measure the water, this could be a reason why our results were not unanimous.

Jeffery's Impromtu Play

Jeffery reminded me that playing with perspective is a good way to shake yourself free from habits or default behaviours.   I set out to do a "serious" science, charting observations, making comparisons, and a graph.  However, it took the keen eyes of a child to show me that, a scale can also be a catapoult, and the frozen balloons,  flew further than the liquid ones, "because they are harder, and not squishy."  Over time the ice balloons began to melt because "it's not in the cold freezer anymore."  And so we have set the stage to learn about the water cycle:  water freezes when it is cold, and melts when it is warm.

What would I do differently next time?  I would weigh balloons before and after freezing with the children instead of preparing the balloons ahead of time.

Water, Water Everywhere: part 1

Now that we have learned that water is all around us, in the entire world and very little of it is fresh water.  My next question was, where can we find water?  The children knew about getting water from the taps, the sky, the ocean, the beach, and from bottles in the store, I asked the children to go home and bring back a sample of water.

Alexis and Pippa: bathtub water
Orin: snow from the ice rink
Tai: water from a puddle by the playground and the water table

Water collection from outdoor water table

Water from bath at home

Water collection from the sink

When I asked the children about finding water in the air, perplexed, Lysander said, waving his hands, there is nothing in the air, it's just there."  With that, I decided that we should explore the different states of water.  Water can be found as a liquid, gas, and solid.

The Earth Group Scientists first task is to play with a milk jug sized ice cube!  Before opening the milk-jug ice, I asked them what would happen to the rectangular shape ice when I put it into a round container.

Pauline, Orin and Jeffery said the ice will stay rectangular shape. Orin also said "because ice is frozen and they stick together."

Pippa said "the ice is rectangle shape, but the water will be round shape!"

Alexis and Tai thought the ice will turn into round shape when it's in a round container.

As I opened the milk jug, children all wanted to have a term to hold it and touch the ice. Pauline said "the ice is hard and cold. It's like glass!" Orin accidentally dropped the ice on the floor, he said "it breaks (chips)!"

It took a long time for the ice to melt so we looked at it again in the afternoon. Jeffery pointed out that half of the ice was gone, he said "half became water!"  Alexis also noticed there was some bubbles inside the remaining ice!

In our next experiment, we moved on to explore the melting speed of ice cubes. We flipped the one minute timer 5 times, then compared the size of ice in each tray. The children created the chart to record their observations. We concluded that the blue salt made the ice melt the fastest and the ice without salt melted the slowest.

How much water is there on Earth? part 2

The children the examined the globe, to get an idea about how much land and water there is in their world.  Orin, Lysander, and Tai were adamant that there is more land than water.   Pippa, Alexis, and Ava thought that there was more water, Jeffery was undecided, and Pauline believed that land and water "are the same amount."

To learn more, we watched a video called GOOD Water. about the planets water and how it is being used.  Inspired by the video, we did a science experiment to illustrate how much fresh drinking water is in the world. 

If all the water on the earth is like a bucket of water, only one spoonful is fresh water that people can use. 

They all tried to scoop a spoon of water. I asked why we can't use the rest of water. Why can't we drink the water from the ocean? What does it taste like?Pauline said "the water tastes salty at the beach!" And with that, the children tasted saltwater. Orin said it won't help when people are thirsty. Pippa, Ava and Lysander even needed to wash their mouths with fresh water. At the end, we concluded that drinking salty water is not helpful when we are thirsty.

As this unit progresses, I wonder whether the idea that water extends beyond their immediate surroundings will help the children be curious about other things that exists beyond what is most familiar.  While it is easy for us to access fresh water through the faucet, perhaps together we can start to wonder whether all children around the world have access to fresh water.

How much water is there on Earth? part 1

The children presented many ideas about the water around them, but I was curious: how much of the world is land and how much of the world is water?  "Do you mean how many oceans there are?"  Orin asked.   And I answered, yes.  Tai said that the beach is land and the water is the ocean.  We further explored this concept through an art activity:

Orin

Jeffery

Tai

Alexis

Pippa

Lysander

First, the children painted the water, and then they glued on the land.  I provided the land at their request.

Pippa thought that there was more water than land, and when I asked her why she said "because it just feels right that way, I like it."  She also said that we live on the land that was far from the other "lands" but we can visit the other "lands" by boat.

Tai thought that there was more land and when I asked him why he didn't paint water on the inside of his world, he said "there's not just water, there is space too."

Most of the children believe that there is more land than water and so next class we will look at a globe for further exploration.