What's Your Hypothesis?

Good evening!

I love working with such inquisitive individuals!  It makes coming to work so much fun!  The students have been thinking a lot about GRAVITY...What is gravity?  How does it work?  What does it do?  How come different things fall differently?

Here is a drawing explaining what the students believe were the cause and effects of gravity on us.

 

With all of these great questions, we went to the dictionary to try and understand the definition of gravity.  It was then that we found a diagram that modeled how gravity affects a ball that is tossed up into the air and is pulled back down towards the center of the earth because of gravity:

We put this diagram to the test and I used my whiteboard eraser as the tool I would toss up into the air.  After repeating the test of throwing the eraser up in the air and seeing if it would come back down, or fly away (it did come back down!), it prompted Kai to ask, "But why doesn't paper fall straight down?"  He went on to explain how when you throw a piece of paper falls from the air, it does not fall right away; it flutters, or floats down.... Hmmm?  Why does this happen?

The class took some time in the afternoon to draw their own hypothesis about what would happen if we threw down a piece of paper and an eraser at the same time.  They are in the process of explaining their hypothesis with what they know to be true because of their common knowledge.  Here are a few examples:

To test their hypothesis, we did the preliminary write up to the experiment and had two volunteers throw paper and an eraser to the ground multiple times and in different ways:  the paper held vertically, the paper held out flat, the paper and the eraser dropped at arms length, the paper and the eraser tossed up into the air.  After the tests, the students concluded that an eraser will always drop straight down, no matter how you drop it and never float to the ground.  However, the paper will always float down because it is lighter, has a wider surface area, and is caught by air before it makes it all the way to the ground, and never fall straight to the ground.

In other news, the class has been counting down the days to the the 100th day of school, which is right around the corner!  They have made a brainstorm of things they would like to try:

So the kids got to work on the 100th Day preparations!

Love, Gaby