It’s dark, it’s mucky, it’s under your fingernails!… Do you go “Yuck”? Do you head for the soap and water? NO WAY! You slip on your white lab coat, take out a magnifying glass, and stroke your chin saying, “Verrrrry interesting!”

You’re a scientist called a Geologist!

Today we got the chance to transform our classroom into “Particle Pete’s Science Lab”! As Scientists we knew we had to notice EVERYTHING, using all of our senses. (Oh… except for the sense of taste, that could be dangerous!) We learned how to “waft” a scent towards our noses and how to do the Scientist Safety Signal with our fingers in the air. Good scientists have good questions, curiosity, and imagination… but they need to LISTEN when the Head Scientist is talking!

We learned that the 4 ingredients of life are sun, water, air, and soil. Did you know that the sun is 4.6 BILLION years old and is about 149 MILLION kilometers away? Our first experiment showed how Solar Energy can be transformed into Mechanical Energy. It was such a rainy day that we needed to use a light, but we still were able to get the little windmill to turn. Then we did our own Water Cycle experiment. We made our little “clouds” soak up the water into the sky and then “rain down” again! The AirZooka was a BLAST (of AIR, that is!) High and low pressures make the air move to different places. That’s how we get wind!

Then we had to use our best observation skills to check out the different parts of soil: rocks, sand, silt, and humus. Did you know that it takes the Earth 500 years just to make 1 inch (3 cm.) of soil? We put them all together into a mini-mountain and used pipettes to “drop the rain” onto them. It didn’t take much for us to see the power of erosion by water! We also checked out the “holding capacity” of the different materials. Rocks let the water run through – that would make the ground too dry for plants to grow well. Clay wouldn’t let water through at all – that would drown plants! It’s important for good soil to have all the different components… especially the rich, nutritious humus.

Finally we had to chance to check out some of the Earth’s most important “soil creatures”… earthworms! They are a lot bigger than our classroom red wiggler compost worms, and they aren’t nearly as shy!

“Particle Pete” gave us a great Science Workshop and he was a fun guy too (he even taught us a Water Cycle song!)
Thanks to “High Tech Science” for a great learning experience!

 

 

 

 

Here’s a fun idea… Hightouch Hightech Science is running SUMMER SCIENCE CAMPS!   You can also book a Scientist to come to a Birthday Party!

http://www.ScienceMadeFunBC.net