Starting and Stopping

We have played around with some marbles. Mr Waller asked, "How do we get a stationery marble to move?" We used our prior knowledge to come up with some ideas. 

• We decided we needed to apply a force. 
• Someone else said add energy. 
• Another idea was to either push or pull it. 
• We thought that all these ideas was applying some pressure. 
• Then we thought about rolling down a hill. That would be the energy or force of gravity.

We are going to make some ramps and roll our marbles and measure how far they roll. This is part of our unit on 'The Nature of Science' where we collect and analyse data. We will make some changes to the ramps we build and measure and analyse what effects that has on how far the marble will roll.
Being a scientist should be fun.

Fair Testing

We are conducting a fair test. To start a fair test, we need a question we want to investigate.

We have a lot of worm farms around our school. We all try and send our food scraps to the compost pile and the worm farms, instead of the landfill. Some schools sell the worm tea that collects at the bottom of their worm farms. It should be good for the environment, right?

Our question is, "does worm tea actually work?"

To make it a fair investigation we need to only change one variable. So...

• we are going to use the same sized containers with one pinhole punched in the bottom
• the soil used will come from the same place
• the containers will be placed beside each other on the windowsill
• 4 bean seeds will go in each container
• each group will select the four most strongest looking seeds
• all the seeds are planted 1 cm deep
• we will measure 20 mls of liquid for each container at a time

The only variable we will change is that one group will water their seeds with H2O, and the other groups will water their seed with worm tea.

We collected some soil from where the workers were constructing our new library.
We planted our 4 seeds in each container.
We measured 20 mls of either H2O or worm tea.

Absorption

We are looking at how different matter have different properties. One property we are looking at is the rate of absorption. 

We have some prior knowledge. 

• We know that we use sponges or cloths to absorb the water that spills on the bench at home. 
• We know that we use towels to absorb the water on our bodies after we have a shower. 
• We know that hard surfaces like steel and glass do not absorb any water. 
• We know that liquid is absorbed, not solids.

We used an eye dropper to count how many drops of water we could put onto different types of paper. We counted how many we could put into the centre of a circle before the water touched the edge.

The papers were all different.

Newspaper

We dropped 32 drops of water on the newspaper, before it hit the edge of the circle. Then we dropped another 13 drops, and it spread 16cm out. We think newspaper is the most absorbent paper.

Pyper, Mele & Alyssa

 

Black Paper

We dropped about 200 water drops and it didn't reach the edge of the circle. It didn't grow too big at that amount of water drops. We think black paper is not very absorbent.

Nelissa, Lyrik & Pori-Na

White Art Paper

We dropped 350 drops of water on our white art paper before it touched the outer line of the circle. White art paper is not good at absorbing.

Albie, Eneasi, Lawton

 Shiny Orange Art Paper

We dropped 100 drops of water on our orange art paper and it didn't move far at all. There were no signs of absorption at all. Shiny orange art paper isn't absorbent.

Pratyush, Jordan & Lucas

Red Art Paper

It took 61 drops of water to reach the edge of the circle. We could see the water spreading across the paper. Absorption rate was quite good. This was a surprise because the surface was quite shiny. We had predicted that this paper wouldn't be as absorbent.

Brody, Erin & Epeli