Exploring Materials

Transdisciplinary theme:

• How the World Works - An inquiry into the natural world and its laws; the interaction between the natural world and human societies, how humans use their understanding of scientific principles; the impact of scientific and technological advances on society and on the environment.

Central Idea

We can do things with wood and paper to find out how they react, how they can change, and what they can be used for.

Lines of Inquiry

• Where wood, paper, and other materials come from
• How wood and paper is used by us
• How we can preserve resources for the future

We experimented with different types of wood to see how they interacted with water.  When we discovered that wood floats, our next objective was to sink the wood block.  Using just rubber bands and paper clips the students had to work together to make their wood block sink and stay on the bottom of the bucket of water.

Using water droppers we observed changes we noticed when we dripped water on different types of wood.

We discussed what things we knew of that were made out of wood - here are examples of what we thought of!

We thought about how we could change the shape and texture of wood - using sandpaper!  We took our sanded blocks and sandpaper home after taking the oath of not sanding the dining room table!!

We mixed wood shavings with a matrix made of corn starch and water (cooked) to create our own examples of particle board.

We used paper and changed it by weaving.

We used paper to make Huge Hats -- then we turned into pirates!