Today was the first ‘official’ day of school for our virtual academy. Hannah whizzed through math, science, language arts, phonics, reading, music and art. I had a science lesson of my own for later in the day to go with her workbook science. Grace read her history, science, literature, art, music and grammar. She’s started leaving the room when she has to read, she curls up in the chair in her room and comes back down when she’s done. Bethany finally had access to her math since it’s using the High school model. She finished up 4 quizzes and the test and did the required tests at the start. I really wasn’t going to make her do them, but they are worth 50 points (just for doing the test, it doesn’t give you a score in the grade book.) So, in effect, you are penalized if you don’t do the pre-tests by 50 points (and quizzes are only worth 5 points apiece, so 50 is quite a lot.) So, fine, she did them. She also went through science, still trying to get the on-line version caught up with what she’s already done since they switched curriculum.
After lunch we did our hands-on science. Hannah was studying states of matter, Grace is studying water and Bethany has work with density.
We went to BrainPOP Jr and looked through their solid, liquid, gas page.
They have a cute video too (free trial or members only to view it. Educators can sign up for free here.) We talked about the states of matter, about how everything is made up of matter, about how the molecules in things act (are they close together or far apart?) Then I went here to guide the girls through a lab on density. First we did the syrup, water and oil experiment. I asked the girls which substance they thought was denser, they thought syrup would sink to the bottom, they thought water would go to the top and oil would be in the middle.
Hannah poured water first, Grace poured oil first. Then they switched and found out that the oil was on top in both of their cylinders. Next we added the syrup and sure enough it sank to the bottom of the cylinder.
They were surprised that the oil was on top, but I reminded Grace about the oil spill we read about, the oil was floating on top of the water, so that made sense when they thought about it. Next we did the hot and cold water experiment, patience when pouring (and a pipette or syringe) is the key to this and the next lab.
Hannah had green ice cold water and Grace had purple hot water.
We poured the cold water into a test tube and carefully added hot water. The cold water was denser, the hot water was less dense. I reminded them that when we swim in the lake the water that is deeper is cooler than the water on top. The last experiment was the coolest. Grace mixed up some salt water and colored it blue, Hannah mixed up sugar water and colored it red and I had plain water colored green. We poured the blue (they fought over the colors, the lab says salt water is red colored, oh well) mix into a test tube, Hannah carefully added red and I topped it off with green.
Looks like my curtains!
Definitely works better with a test tube and pipette or syringe, otherwise you can’t pour it slow enough and you just get purple. As for volume/density/mass equations we had the mass of each item thanks to the scale (minus the weight of the cylinder) so we just had to add in the volume used to get the density (D= m/v, m= d*v, v= m/d.)
