Eggstravaganza! You gotta see it to believe it!

Today was quite the egg-citing day! We did two hands-on activities, and we all had so much fun! One activity was called How Strong is It? As you can see from the pictures, we were testing the strength of raw eggs using our reading textbooks (which my students thought was pretty cool)! In order to set up all of the fun, I laid out all of the materials on the blue table and asked my students what they thought we were going to do with these items. Many thought we were going to set the eggs on top of the books, but we were in for a much bigger treat.

As soon as the big secret was revealed, we wrote down the scientific process steps to help organize our experiment. We devised our hypothesis, listed all of the material needed, and put the steps to be followed in sequential order. Then it was time for the excitement!

I had several student volunteers help make clay molds, set the eggs on the clay, and finally gently placed the textbooks on top of the eggs. When some of the eggs started to wobble a bit, there was quite a stir in our classroom! We successfully placed 4 textbooks on top of the eggs before one egg slid out and rolled onto the floor-what a mess! The force of the books caused the other egg to break upon impact. I didn't get a picture of that-too bad!

Finally, we recorded our observations and placed our data in a table. We discussed our conclusions amidst laughter and smiles:)

The second activity we completed was testing the weight of a raw egg. All students made predictions as to the number of objects it would take to equally balance the scale. We used unifix cubes, scissors, plastic links, and crayons. After all predictions had been made, one student placed the egg on one side of the balance. One by one, randomly selected students put an object into the opposite side. Another student kept track of tally marks on the whiteboard. Here's what some looked like!

The weighing of the scissors posed some interesting questions: Are all scissor weights the same? What about your scissors, Mrs. Watkins? They are bigger than ours and probably heavier too. You also have metal scissors-will that have the same results? This was a fun discussion, so of course we tested each one! It took two student scissors to balance the weight of an egg; one of my scissors to balance the weight; and the metal scissors were way too heavy! What a memorable day!