A "Rocky" Day

Another rocky day in class!

A piece of granite... Will it sink or float?

A pumice stone...Based on our experience with the other three rocks,
everyone predicts it will sink.


Let's put it in...

It floats! Why?

It has been another busy week in the Early Learning Center! In preparation for our field trip next week to the Seattle Children's Theater, we have been reading books by Laura Numeroff such as, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, If You Take a Mouse to School, If You Give a Pig a Pancake, etc. Besides being delightful fiction, the recurring themes are providing us the opportunity to analyze the stories. After we read one of the books, we return to it for discussion about character, setting and finding the problem. In this series, we are discovering that some of the characters are seen in more than one book, the settings are familiar and the problem is the same: the animal character wants more, MORE, MORE of everything! The series is providing great reinforcement for developing these higher level thinking skills. As another form of reinforcement, we are looking forward to baking cookies tomorrow to take with us for lunch when we go to the play!

We're having a fantastic time learning more about rocks. We focused on Igneous rocks this week, especially volcanic rocks. We watched a volcano video which made a fiery impression, then moved into other related "hot topics" such as vents in the earth, Mt. St. Helens, and Mt. Rainier. Of course we examined various igneous rocks, admiring their mighty heft and many popped bubbles on the surface. Then today I brought in some natural pumice stone that I gathered on the shores of Lake Atitlan, a big highland lake in Guatemala surrounded by perfect cone volcanoes. We brought out a bowl of water and did a sink and float experiment. We began by asking the question of each rock: Will this sink or float? The children formed a hypothesis or prediction. At first, most of the children hypothesized the granite would float. By the second rock, we were evenly divided, and with the third, a black volcanic rock, everyone predicted that it would sink. Then I pulled out the pumice, which we had already handled and examined, noting how light it was. They all predicted that it would sink. As I placed it in the water, the children became so excited to see that it floated. Now to analyze the "why!" There were lots of ideas, and finally we put together that all that air in the pumice must have something to do with the floating... maybe like a beach ball with air trapped inside? We will have this experiment set up next week for every child to perform individually, to see if the results are the same! "Independent researchers will verify the results."

I think the next natural extension of our study is to make a class field trip to lovely Lake Atitlan, paddle out in hand carved tree trunk canoes, called cayucos, to collect our own pumice floating on the blue waters. Whose names will be on the sign up sheet for this one?