Year+4+Science+2011

Year 4 Science Page

"What does it Matter?" Chemical Change and material properties.

Jodie Daniel presented an excellent lesson relating to the changes to steel wool when bleach is added! The classroom smells a bit like the local pool, but the kids have made some great predictions as to what will happen to the mixture overnight. We will see if their hypothesis is correct! I predict a lot of rust.

The activity was taken from 3//65 Activities For Science// book, a great resource. The lesson will be followed by a scientific report format that was introduced during the initial lesson. This will be a recurring theme throughout the year, as the students are adding more to each lesson themselves.

Week 7 - __//Home- made Glue//__ - 365 Activities For Science

This week Year 4 science made glue and learnt about the chemical changes that occur when water and flour are mixed together. Everyone got the opportunity to mix, play and most importantly glue shapes together to test what happens to the mixture once the glue dries.

We made some predictions (hypothesised) what would happen once the glue dried. We also created a secondary test by comparing and contrasting real UHU glue against our home-made glue. I think most people underestimated the strength of flour and water!!

The students have demonstrated their enjoyment of the hands-on aspects of science. We feel that this is an important feature of the teaching of science, to make it real-life and relevant. As Science becomes ever more theoretical in older year levels, this aspect can be lost, along with the intrinsic enjoyment of the subject area. It is important to include a strong element of fun into the early (and hopefully later as well) lessons. The splitting of our year 3 and year 4 classes is working well at this stage.

Please watch our video of some of the exciting things we have been doing during science!

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Week 8 - //Corny Goo// - 365 Science Experiments This week science got very gooey!! The students investigated chemical changes that occured when adding corn flour and water together to form goo. We watched a [|Clip] on teacher tube of someone sinking and running across a big tub of corny goo (much like quicksand) that demonstrated some of the goo's strange behvaiours, such as acting like a liquid and also acting like a solid. All the students loved the clip and were eager to try out their own... smaller versions. Each group were given cornflour and water and they conducted their own experiement to test the different changes. It was concluded by students that if you roll the goo, it feels dry and hard like a solid. However, when you stop rolling, it slowly spreds over your fingers, like a liquid. In groups and individually students explained their results through a variety of diagrams and discriptions. ﻿ 