Science experiments

The kids have been busy this week working on grammar: verbs, adverbs and direct and indirect objects.  I'm getting a little basic grammar review myself!  They are also writing in their journals daily, this is a space for them to write anything they want: made up stories, talk about the weeks work etc.  All that I ask is that it not be private as I do read them.  We started Norse Myths and we are having a blast (more to come on that in another post)!  Science this week has been a basic over view of physical science:  states and conditions of matter, atoms, molecules, a little on the nature of light, and today we talked about buoyancy force.  So I knew we needed to have something fun today with all this hard work.  Well, how fun to watch them perform their own experiment!

  The expressions on their faces when it actually worked was wonderful, though hard to capture with my iPhone (I really do need a decent camera with a high speed shutter).  For today's experiment they put water in a jar with a tight fitting lid, that jar was then placed inside a larger (plastic soda bottle with the top cut off) container of water. 

The jar slowly sank.  Next they removed the jar, added salt to the water and again placed the jar in...it began to float! 

As more salt was added the water became denser creating more buoyancy force causing the jar to float.

We've now decided that we should do a science experiment day every week.  Such fun!