We rotated through 5 Kindergarten classes (~30 minute each) at Linton-Stockton Elementary to explore ideas of why things sink/float. We asked “why things sink (or float)…” and there were lots of good ideas about “heavy” and “light” and “big” and “gravity” and “pushing up”. One young scientist said that the water was heavier than the boat (for floating), which is pretty darn close to the Physics.
We used some 6 qt totes at each station and added about a half gallon of water. We gave them a variety of objects to touch and hold : popsicle sticks, Lincoln Log, plastic wheel, plastic flower petal, plastic bear, nail, bolt, wing nut, spacer, playdough, crayon, penny. Their task was to predict if they thought the items would sink or float, then put them in a sink pile and a float pile. Now came time to test, and we did 1 item at a time from one of the piles (kinda). After two or three minutes of discussions, questions, ponderings… we did the other pile. We asked if anybody got every item correct , were they surprised by any item, discussed what kinds of things were at the bottom and what kids were at the top of the water.
After the first class, I decided to do the playdough separately, after the two piles. So a ball of playdough sank for everyone (some predicted correctly, some did not). I said I could make playdough float….if I changed the shape. So we all tried to make a bowl shape out of our playdough. It worked for some of us, some it did not…those sides are tricky. Especially with wet playdough.
We gave everyone a piece of aluminum foil, about 12″x12″ (roughly square), and asked them to shape it into a boat. As you can expect, some did a wonderful job folding and bending it, some needed a little help. Almost all got their shape to float. The real test though, was how many pennies could it hold. They had to take turns adding pennies to their boat and count how many until it started sinking.
The playdough and the foil boat were the messiest parts of this activity. Wet playdough gets all over our hands (& the table). Taking the foil boat in and out of the water to test it gets water all over the table. The teachers and I spent a good amount of effort getting paper towels around to everyone.
I also had an origami boat activity ready, but we had used up our 30 minute block of time. One teacher tried it with the kids after I went to another room , and had a few successes. I used 8.5″ x 8.5″ paper (i didnt think to order origami paper so i cut regular paper “square”) It came from this video
A messy and successful day.
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