Mystery Samples

Today, my students completed one of my favorite labs of the year.  The students take film canisters (you know, from back when we had rolls of actual film for the camera) that have mystery items sealed inside.  They shake each canister and make an observation about the sound it makes.  Then, they test to see if it is magnetic.  Finally, they make an inference about what is in the canister.  This lab is so fun to watch, and the kids guesses are awesome!  Sometimes they are right on and other times they are very off, but creative. :-) Inside the canisters are items like paperclips, rubber bands, marble, button, eraser, paper, and toothpicks.  I have 15 canisters and they rotate in groups about every two minutes.  They have to work quickly, but that is part of the fun.  If you don't know what is in the canister more time isn't going to help.

The lab comes from the book Picture Perfect Science.  We do the whole observation and inference section in the book.  I love that I get to read "kids" books to my 6th graders.  They always get pretty excited about the fact that they get story time again.  They all gather around on the carpet at my feet while I read.  Some are too "cool" to act excited, but they love it too.

The Scientific Method

This last week, my students were learning about the scientific method. We have taken some notes in their interactive notebooks and have finished 2 labs so far.

The first set of notes was not all that exciting. It was just some basic definitions and such. For notes on the actual scientific method process we made a "wheel". I was pretty happy with the way it turned out, and the kids got a kick out of the clip art.

These are some pictures of the templates I made and the kid's books as they worked.

The first lab that we did this week was outside. I had the kids take string and mark off a 10 foot x 10 foot square for their group. In their group they had to make a hypothesis about how many four-leaf clovers they would be able to find in their square in 20 minutes. This was really hard, but some groups did find a few.

This was their lab worksheet... (You can purchase this lab at my TpT store)

We also did a magic grow lab on Thursday. For this lab each group picked a magic grow capsule. (you know those sponges that grow in water from a capsule). They had to make a hypothesis about their capsule, then they soaked the capsule, measured the sponge after it grew, and wrote a conclusion.

This coming week, we still have a lab on the computer and then we get to do my favorite part of the unit... Observations and Inferences!!! I absolutely love this part. I love the books we read and the labs we do. I will write a post more on that later. :-)