Thursday 3 April 2014

Integrating science into literacy - Home Made Lava-Lamps


Background
The last 2 weeks we have been writing explanations relating to oil and water. We built our knowledge about the properties and characteristics of these substances, then explored authentic examples  like the Rena disaster in New Zealand and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Part of student voice at Stonefields was the demand for more science in our writing. So we also built knowledge on molecules, density, mixtures and emulsions, reactions and more. A huge amount of hard work and purposeful learning went down before we could create our lava lamps - but it was worth it.

Experiment Day

Discussion and Explanation 
First off, Mr Lunn explained to us how a lava lamp can be created. We only needed household ingredients, and a bit of scientific knowledge. We discussed as a class the key words and understandings we would need in order to know and explain what was happening in the experiment.


Roles 
Collaboration is valued very highly here at Stonefields, and so we each had different roles in the experiment procedure to give everyone a turn. Some of us were scribes, some of us were on camera duty, and the others helped with the ingredients. Everyone was so engaged and into it, great to see!




The experiment

We are currently working on presentations to explain how we made the lava lamps.
Watch this space, because next Monday it will be filled with iMovies, animations and other multimedia that conveys our learning.



1 comments:

Tyler said...

Nice work keep going on you experiments and hope you make things like a volcanoes and more.

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