Magnets for 2nd Grade

Here are the STEM activities for magnets for 2nd grade.  The first four activities in this set came from Janice Van Cleave's book called Magnets (1993).   She has written many books with great activities.  The four used below are all tried and true, and have been used for the last 6 years in class.  These activities try to get the students thinking about the strength of the magnetic field and how it can be disrupted.  The last activity is from the Exploratorium snacks page.  Three magnets are placed on a platform and a fourth is suspended from a string and the magnet on the string is set in motion.  The magnets cause the motion of the hanging magnet to be chaotic.  Second graders obviously will not have a good grasp of this idea, but is a fun activity and they do understand the idea of predictability.

Virginia Standards

2.1 Scientific Investigation
2.2 Force, Motion, and Energy

Next Generation Science Standards
K-2-ETS1-1 Engineering Design
2-PS1-1.A Matter
3-PS2-3 Magnetic Interations

First Grade: Playing with Liquids

Staying on the water and liquids theme, here are four experiments for the first graders that mostly came from Janice Van Cleave.  She has lots of great books about various science topics.  For these activities I started with some of her ideas and expanded on them.  Again, I set up four tables and had a volunteer at each table to oversee the experiments with the students.  For the liquid density experiment, I would have the volunteer  run the experiment because it could get so messy.  However, the kids love to see all of the liquids poured into one container and see them separate just as they predicted on their data sheets.

These meet the following standards:

Virginia Science Standards

• 1.1 Scientific Reasoning
• 1.3 Matter
• 1.8 Resources

The Next Generation Science Standards

• K-2-ETS1.1 Engineering Design
• 2-PS1-1.A Matter
• KESS3.C Human Impact on Earth

Kindergarten - Water Exploration

This is a unit that I do with the kindergarten classes.  In Virginia, the students study water and do the classic sink and float experiments.  In this unit, I introduce prediction and observation through water play.  There are many concepts in here that are a bit complex for kindergarten students, but you can get the ideas across using simple examples.  Some of the children will "get it" right away, and others might not understand very much, but they will remember the experiments.

Here are the standards that these experiments address:

Virginia Standards

• K.1  Scientific Reasoning
• K.5  Matter

Next Generations Science Standards

• K-2 ETS1-1  Engineering Design
• 2-PS1-1.A  Matter

I try and do these experiments outside in the fall or spring.  Depending on how much you let the children do they can get a bit wet.  I use square wash tubs to hold the water.  All the materials are readily available.  I have seen various versions of these experiments in books and through the web.   I have a set-up of four stations per classroom, which means there would need to be four adults available. The session is set to run in 45 minutes with about 10 minutes at each station.  The files are loaded as jpg files.  If you want them in a pdf format or word you can email me for those files.

Changing Focus

As time has passed, my kids are growing older, and my son is midway through middle school and my daughter is almost through elementary school.  I am still running sessions at the elementary school, but not as many.  I have decided maybe the best way to get more people involved is to start posting all of my work on the site in hopes that other people will take it and use it.  My work has mainly been a compilation of experiments from books, the web, and many that I have developed.  Where the experiment is unique, I have given credit for the experiment or idea.  Experiments that I have found in multiple locations, I have not referenced one or the many, and in most cases I have modified the experiments to suit our needs.  The experiments range from science related to various topics to design exercises.

I hope that people will find them useful.

I will try to load one or two a week until I get through them all.  I will start with Kindergarten, go through the grades until I have all of my work uploaded.  They will be uploaded as jpg files.  If you find them useful, you can contact me and I will be happy to email you a pdf or word file.

I will still teach workshops for teachers and run sessions at the schools when asked.  Just contact me if you want more information.

Brushbots After School

We have a great after school program at my children's elementary school.  People from around the community come in to teach different subjects including:  jewelry making, cooking, gardening, karate, skateboarding, soccer, basketball, tennis, running, sewing, fashion design, legos, etc.  You name it, and there is probably a class for it.  I decided to offer a class in building brush bots for fourth and fifth graders.  The fourth graders learn about circuits in class and build a simple circuit using aluminum foil, a battery and a small light bulb.  Building on this, I decided to offer them a chance to build their own brushbots.

A brushbot is a circuit with a vibrating motor on top of a brush such as a nailbrush or toothbrush.

The kits are a bit pricey ($15-20), so I decided to make my own using a nailbrush, a battery holder, a switch, and a motor.  I had the motors from another project but had gotten them for about $1.00 each, the battery holder was $2.00, the nailbrush, $1.00 from Target and the switch was $3.50 at Radioshack.  So the total cost for my brushbot was $7.50.  It could have been cheaper if I had bought the components in bulk from internet supply stores, but I had only 4 kids in the class, so Radioshack was convenient.

Above are three of the bots built by the fourth and fifth graders.  They had a great time building them and felt a real sense of accomplishment when we got them all up and running.

Here is another photo.  The main problem we had was getting the kids to make a good connection to the various components with the wires and then taping them with electrical tape.  For some of the kids, it was a bit challenging.  But, after a few tries, most of them got pretty adept at wiring.  The other problem we ran into was balancing the bots so they vibrated without falling over.  That task involved moving the components around on top of the brushes until we got them balanced.  I used balanced motors, so to get the motors unbalanced to allow them to vibrate we attached alligator clips.  Today, the kids will finish making there vibrating bugs.  I will show photos of those next week.

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Models and Learning by Doing or How Design Failures Can Teach the Best Lessons

Today, I and a couple of volunteers went into the 2nd grade classroom and had the students build models of satellites.   The students have already had "changes of state" lessons in which they learn about solids, liquids and gasses.  Building off of that, I use the activity from teachengineering called Beat the Heat.
In this activity, I talk to the students about models.  We talk about how you can build a model car out of legos, or build a model airplane.  It is not the same as the real thing, but that you can build and test aspects of the design.  Today, we used plastic eggs as a model for the shell of a satellite that we want to send to Venus.  Venus is a hot planet reaching temperatures of 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit.  We talk about what kinds of things you would want to learn about Venus, so we decide a camera is one of the most important things you would want in your satellite.  Instead of using a camera in our test, we use butter.  The idea is to give the students a pat of butter and have them protect it from heat.  We also give the students various materials to use such as tooth picks, cloth, packing peanuts, cotton balls, balsa wood.

The students then design and build their satellite model using these materials.  

Next, they draw and label their designs.

Finally, I use box fitted it with a hole for a hair dryer for a heat source, with a thermometer and a viewing window with egg cartons in the bottom for holding eggs.  I then turn on the hair dryer and heat the box to 160 degrees F.   This is our Venus simulator or testing rig.

After the temperature in the box reaches 160 degrees F, we take apart the eggs and look at the results.

We learn that if the butter is kept away from the surface of the eggs, it generally survives, but if it is in contact with the egg, it will melt.

In the second of the six classes I ran this exercise with today I had one group whose butter completely melted.  The group was pretty dejected, but one of the other students spoke up and said,

" Don't worry.  Ms. Skalak told me last year that failing was a learning experience.  Last year when we built water filters I ended up with sand all in my water.  But, now I know better how to design the filter."

I asked the student if he remembered it more because it didn't work out as he had hoped, and he said yes.

Learning by doing is a great way to get the students to learn a concept not just with their head, but with their whole being.  I think this student learned many lessons last year:

•  he will never put sand in a water filter without something to hold the sand in the filter such as cloth or screen
• the failure of his design was a bit painful at the time, but it is something that engineers have happen all the time
• it is okay to fail, because it gives you an opportunity to learn and make it better

Are the students going to run out and build a satellite for NASA based on these ideas?  Of course not, but if they can learn something like this student did about failure, and the opportunity to learn something from the failure.   I think the exercise is more than worth it in time and effort, and besides, it is just fun to do.