Science Experiments

 

        At Double Creek, we love science! Our younger group was studying volcanos and finished the unit by making their own paper mache volcano. The whole school came to watch the "explosion." The younger group does a lot of Magic School Bus inspired science. Sherilyn even has dresses to go with her units. Unfortunately, we have not been able to find a magic bus.   

        Here the kids are preparing to build their volcano. Getting messy and exploring our world is all part of building scientific understanding. 

            How can our tiny moon cover up the enormous sun? We explained solar eclipses by letting each student experience their own eclipse as the tiny ball held by Joy blocks their view of the giant ball. Whenever possible, we like to teach science with hands on experiments. 

 

Guest author T., 4th grade, writes about his experiences in the older science group using the Beast Academy curriculum and doing additional student designed experiments.  

        Beast Academy is a fun and enriching program. Beast Academy is a world of fun little monsters teaching us about math and science. The most fun for the kids is the guide, which is a comic book about little monsters learning how to do math and science. Originally it was only math books but now they have science books and here's a little about what the kids are doing in Beast science.

        The first big project was for each kid to make a pendulum and see how long the string needed to be so each swing of the pendulum was exactly one second. For other experiments the pendulum had to be able to vary its weight and string length. Each kid made their own pendulum entirely on their own. First, they all drew a plan for what they were going to build and they started to build it they added changes as they needed. 

 

Here are the students' pendulums (some are not complete in the pictures, though). 

        Later, in our own unit, we learned about making a science fair experiment. We did it on growing lettuce to see if a greenhouse worked better than normal. We got to design and build a green house over one of the garden beds. The other group wanted to see if peat pellets work better than garden soil. If you don't know what a peat pellet is, it's a small piece of dirt that is very compact and if you add water to it it'll puff up and it has a small sack around it that will slowly decompose. 

                           

This table shows the number of plants we counted each day.

	Greenhouse sprouts	Control sprouts
4/15/24	15	5
4/17/24	16	19
4/22/24	11	24
4/23/24	12	30
5/1/24	4	37
5/6/24	3	26
5/13/24	2	28

Conclusion:

In our experiment the lettuce grew better when planted straight in the ground than in a greenhouse. This data is not consistent with our hypothesis. The greenhouse retained humidity, kept the lettuce safe from harsh rain and hail, and led to faster initial germination. However, by the end of the experiment all of the plants had disappeared. We suspect maybe from animals, like slugs.