Lesson 1 - Monday, Oct 9 - No school
Focus Question: —
What We Did: —
What We Figured Out: —
How We Represented It: —
Homework: —
Lesson 2 - Tuesday, Oct 10
Focus Question: What happens when a bath bomb is added to water (and what causes it/that to happen)?
What We Did: Building on the noticings and wonderings we did during the lesson on Parents Day, students were asked to propose a bath-bomb focused investigation that can 1) contribute an answer to the last part of our current Focus Question (What causes a bath bomb to dissolve and/or produce bubbles?) and, 2) contribute an answer to our Driving Question (How can we make something new that was not there before?). To help students organize and focus their investigation, Dr. M introduced them to the Planning and Carrying Out Investigations graphic organizer. It became clear early in the lesson, however, that most students did not have a good understanding of not only how to write scientific research questions, but also how to correctly identify “independent variables,” “dependent variables,” and “constants,” so that will be a focus of an upcoming lesson.
What We Figured Out: Students lack of familiarity with writing good research questions and identifying variables actually got in the way of figuring out things during today’s lesson.
How We Represented It: —
Homework: There is no science homework tonight.
Lesson 3 - Wednesday, Oct 11
Focus Question: What happens when a bath bomb is added to water (and what causes it/that to happen)?
What We Did: Students had a chance to see their current Effort and Academic grades today when Dr. Merritt shared them on the whiteboard. Students also had the chance to hear more about Dr. M’s special grading system and learn about a new resource-based section added to the Google Science Classroom called “Helpers.” Finally, Dr. M shared some new learning targets with students related to writing research questions and identifying variables. As a first step in learning these new skills, Dr. M asked students to complete a Planning and Carrying Out Investigations graphic organizer for a class investigation in which we have plans to put four miniature bath bombs made with different ingredients into beakers of water.
What We Figured Out: Both C and D period figured out that bath bomb recipe C seems to produce more bubbling action than recipes A, B, and D.
How We Represented It: We did not have time to represent the newly discovered bubbling power of recipe C, but some students recorded it on video.
Homework: —
Lesson 4 - Friday, Oct 13
Focus Question: What causes the bubbling of a bath bomb to happen?
What We Did: Students carried out the investigation as described by their Planning and Carrying Out Investigations organizer, which meant that they put approximately 1 gram of each of the four different bath bombs into a pre-determined volume of water and made observations related to two focus actions: bubbling and dissolving.
What We Figured Out: Recipe C seems to yield the most immediate bubbling and dissolving activity. Recipes A & D seemed to yield the least bubbling activity. Recipe C also seems to contain the largest quantities of both baking soda and citric acid (1.7x more citric acid than the other recipes and 1.5x more baking soda than the others). Students could see an oily film on the top layer of most of the beakers, which we said might mean that oil is one of the substances that might not be changed into something new during the bath bomb reaction. Recipe A has a brownish colored sediment visible 74 hours after the start of the experiment. Recipe D did not fully dissolve after 74 hours; we saw visible pieces on the bottom. Oil appears to be less dense than water, and so oil ‘floats’ on water. Recipes A, B, & D all contained water in the recipe and we know that water reacts with baking soda and citric acid to start a bubbling reaction, so it seems that the bath bombs from Recipes A, B, & D had already bubbled/reacted some before we ever put them into water (that’s maybe why the structure of the bath bombs looked like stale/dried bread–aka. croutons–before putting them into the water).
How We Represented It: Students should have recorded their most important investigation observations in their science notebooks.
Homework: There is no science homework this weekend.
Announcements...
The DRIVING QUESTION of our current unit is: How can we make something new that was not there before?
#1 - There is no school for students and teachers on Monday, 9 Oct because of the annual TASIS Parents Weekend.
#2 - ...