Because we are going to be going on our field trip to the pumpkin patch/apple orchard later this week, I thought it might be a good idea to introduce sinking and floating to my students.  You might ask what these two things have in common…

This wee we have been talking/learning about apples so once we get back from the orchard, we will be “testing” our apples in different ways including seeing if they float or sink.  We will also try the same thing with different sized pumpkins the following week.

Here is the sheet I created for our Science notebooks: (We filled in the Prediction side before we got any materials out–however, I did show the children what each material looked like before we predicted)

sinkfloatsheetjournal

Here are some pictures of the great experiment:

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This was one of those lessons when I had a great idea of the direction we were headed and after looking at the cups of water and 24 children, my directions suddenly changed so that this experiment would be more “controlled”.  I placed each cup of water on a tray and then assigned specific materials to each child to place in the water.  I led the class like this…, “If you have the crayon, please place it in the water now”….wait 30 seconds to watch what happens…”If you put the crayon in the water, please remove it now”.  Then we continued with all the other items, one at a time.  This way prevented all the items from going in at once and from the kids fighting over which person got to put what item into the water.  There are 8 items on the sheet, so at my tables of 4 each child was responsible for 2 items.  After we were all cleaned up, the children brought their science journals (with this page glued in) to the floor and we discussed the results and marked them accordingly on our charts.

Kristen 🙂