Simple Experiments: Sinker!

Objective:  This experiment was conducted to determine how density affects water movement. 

Sinker!

1.  Prepare your  materials: salt, 200ml of warm water for your salty ocean water and a half filled clear water (representing freshwater).

2.  Create a mixture of salty water for your ocean.  Make sure that your water is warm enough to dissolve all the salt.  Add more salt until it can no longer be dissolve in your water mixture.  Add food colouring, I used a blue colour to represent the ocean.

                        

3.  Pour your salty water in the bowl of clear water.

4.  Observe the bowl from the side as you pour the water (as your helper pour the salty water). 

                      

As you can see the coloured salty water sinks to the bottom of the container, forming waves under the clear water above it.  The salty water (ocean) is more dense than the clear water it will stay under the clear water.

Floater!

Now another experiment we performed was to test how the water density affects the ability of an object to float.  This case, we prepared another salty water (in a big bowl) and a clear water in a separate bowl.  We used a boiled egg, as our test subject.

Drop the egg in the bowl of clear water.  It sank into the bottom of the bowl right away.

Now we tested the same boiled egg in a bowl full of salty water.  Once dropped,  it sank for a second but then it started to float afterwards!! Mavi was in awe!!

 

In this case, it easier for humans to swim in the ocean because of the higher density of the salty water helps to keep our bodies higher in water :) 

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FREE Stamp Game Sheets

Like my Stamp Game sheets that were used in our Static Addition and Dynamic Addition activities?  You can get your copy now by clicking the image below. Or by clicking this link.


For the first page, I printed it multiple times. Then, I cut it in the middle and created a booklet.  For the second page, we used it to practice writing numbers as seen in my Static Addition post.  And the last page, I randomly wrote a number and Mavi has to indicate the correct number of thousands, hundreds, tens and units.

Colorwheel Flowers

I came across this project at Deep Sparkle and decided to try this with Mavi.  I love how simple the project is and it uses basic colour combinations.  Since the project involves the colorwheel, Mavi and I revisited our basic art lessons about colours a few years ago. We talked about the primary and the secondary colours and how the are organised in a wheel type figure so we can easily remember the colour combinations.

                      

Read about colour theory I and colour theory II.

Mavi worked on the red, orange, green and yellow combinations, while I painted a blue-violet flower combination.  And here’s how they looked like after we added  black and white paint details.

The flowers turned out really good and the colours were vibrant! You can see these hanging in Mavi’s room as of the moment.

For the details of the projects, click this link from Deep Sparkle.

Linking to:

Montessori Monday
TGIF Linky Party
Teach Beside Me
Preschool Corner
Teaching Mama
I Can Teach My Child
Home + School = Afterschool!
Share It Saturday
The Natural Homeschool

Dynamic Addition

Our dynamic addition starts with a brief discussion of what makes a 10 using a unit (1’s), 100 using 10’s and a 1000 using 100’s.  This is a visual presentation of smaller units that we can group together to form a bigger units.  From here, I told Mavi that whenever he encounters this when he plays Stamp Game, all he needed to do was to “substitute” the group with a bigger value. 

 

 

The concept of dynamic addition in Montessori is the same whether you use golden beads, stamp game or bead frame.  Here’s how we do it:

• [Top left photo] Mavi would take out a strip of paper with a written equation and copies it in our booklet.  [Top left photo]
• [Top right photo] He would layout all the stamps according to the equation.  Then perform the addition by combining the two sets. See our Static Addition for this.
• [Lower left photo]  Count the stamps starting from the unit’s place value. He counted 13 units, grouped the 10 units (green) and replaced it with a 10 (blue).  As you can see, he was confused at first he put the 10 (blue) in the units area.  This I emphasized that he has to place it on the correct area in the place value mat.
• [Top right photo]  He recorded the sum after he worked on the tens and hundreds, applying the same concept of regrouping.

Note:  Mavi has memorized a lot of number pair in addition.  Most of the time he doesn’t use the stamps or beads, he automatically do the addition work.  Sometimes he would start on the thousands going down to the units. I have to explain that he always need to start from the smallest unit.  This is because he will produce an incorrect sum once the equation is dynamic.  That is the number changes (addends) because of the regrouping.  And he understood this somehow when finished a few equation strips.

Well, that’s all for dynamic addition for now.  This is just an introductory to my 6 years old.  We’ll practice more of this next year.