7 Steps of Science - Step 3 and 4
The Third Step of Science is to "Take a Look" (observation).
Before we could Take a Look we had to define one of the words in our question: HOT. Mrs. Williams was visiting our class during science and shared that she had a good example of HOT. She was sweating. Our room was HOT. We collected the sweat from her cheek (see example 1 picture) and we compared it to the same area of William (he can sweat big drops when he's been outside after lunch). Mrs. Williams had 2 drops and William had none! We decided that we could not use Mrs. Williams as a good indicator because William was not sweating too. I asked the class if they knew of anything in their homes that could tell if the home was hot. Mersaydie's drew a picture of a thing on her wall that was round and had numbers on it. We located one of those things in our room too but ours was a rectangular prism. They found out that it was called a thermostat and that it measured how hot or cold the house was inside. I introduced a model of a large paper thermometer to the class and we decided that if the red line went up, that indicated that the room was getting HOT. Next I introduced a tool that would always tell the truth about the temperature and was not controlled by the teacher. It was a temperature probe from Vermier.
The Fourth Step of Science is "Write it Down" (data)
I demonstrated how the software on the computer collected the data from the probe and that it was much more accurate than the paper thermometer, the small glass thermometer in the thermostat. or Mrs. Williams and William. The next thing to do was to Take a Look and Write it Down so we decided to see if the lights overhead made the room HOT. The temperature probe helped us do both of these steps. The graph from the software showed that the closer we got to the lights the hotter it got. We proved that the lights did make the room HOT. The software and probe helped us with the next two Steps of Science but we ran out of time to discuss it. We have three more parts of our Make a Guess to work on as well as the remaining Steps of Science. Please come back next week to read our posts and learn with us!
If you have a question or comment, please share it with us.
Mr. Bennett
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posted by The Dream Factory @ 9/07/2007 09:46:00 PM
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