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science for tinies: balance!
Jan. 29th, 2012 06:00 pmProject: Which Weighs More?
Materials: bucket balance, various things
Explanatory details: Aunt Chaos gave Juniper this excellent bucket balance for Christmas, which Juniper has been playing around with, but we had not yet tried using for more purposeful experimentation. We started out in the living room, determining such things as the plastic onion is heavier than the plastic pepper, four wooden cookies weigh more than three cookies, etc. Then we moved to the kitchen and got out the dried rice&bean tub, and found that a big scoop full of the rice mix weighs more than the little scoop, a big-scoopful of water weighs more than the big-scoopful of rice mix, and two ducks are heavier than the little rock but the big rock is heavier than three ducks (because all science eventually turns into ducks if permitted).
How did it go: Great. I think this is a tool we'll be using for a long time, in increasingly sophisticated ways.
Things we talked about: This time around, I was mostly curious to see whether Junie got the basic idea that the bucket that went down was the heavier one (which she did) and whether she expected that more of a given thing (whether countable like cookies or mass like rice) would always weigh more than less of it (I *think* so? She didn't really want to guess-then-test, she wanted to chuck stuff in there.)
What Junie got out of it: My favorite moment of the whole experiment was when we had something in both buckets of the balance - the pepper and the onion, I think - and she very deliberately took them both out and put them back in on the opposite sides of the balance, confirming that it was the bucket-with-the-onion that went down and not the left bucket. That was SCIENCE!, right there, and it was all her.
Materials: bucket balance, various things
Explanatory details: Aunt Chaos gave Juniper this excellent bucket balance for Christmas, which Juniper has been playing around with, but we had not yet tried using for more purposeful experimentation. We started out in the living room, determining such things as the plastic onion is heavier than the plastic pepper, four wooden cookies weigh more than three cookies, etc. Then we moved to the kitchen and got out the dried rice&bean tub, and found that a big scoop full of the rice mix weighs more than the little scoop, a big-scoopful of water weighs more than the big-scoopful of rice mix, and two ducks are heavier than the little rock but the big rock is heavier than three ducks (because all science eventually turns into ducks if permitted).
How did it go: Great. I think this is a tool we'll be using for a long time, in increasingly sophisticated ways.
Things we talked about: This time around, I was mostly curious to see whether Junie got the basic idea that the bucket that went down was the heavier one (which she did) and whether she expected that more of a given thing (whether countable like cookies or mass like rice) would always weigh more than less of it (I *think* so? She didn't really want to guess-then-test, she wanted to chuck stuff in there.)
What Junie got out of it: My favorite moment of the whole experiment was when we had something in both buckets of the balance - the pepper and the onion, I think - and she very deliberately took them both out and put them back in on the opposite sides of the balance, confirming that it was the bucket-with-the-onion that went down and not the left bucket. That was SCIENCE!, right there, and it was all her.
