Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Sink or Float Experiment

Here's a fun little story extension from the book Who Sank the Boat by Pamela Allen.



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The book has a simple little plot about animals that go for a ride in the row boat. As each animal hops in the boat the question is asked "Do you know who sank the boat?".

Great story to introduce the concept of what makes things sink and what makes things float.

After we read the story I made a simple graph- with the words sink on one side and float on the other.

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Ahead of time I gathered several objects to test if they could sink or float. I told my daughter we were going to conduct an experiment and be scientists. We talked about those new words :experiment and scientists. My 3 year old pulled from the bag and I had her predict if she thought it was going to sink or float. (we also talked about the word predict).

She tested it out in the bucket of water and then placed the object in the corresponding column.

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When she was done testing them all we compared and contrasted the columns. I asked "Which one has more?", "Which one has less?".

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She loved it and after we were done wanted to find more objects to test!

PTM Storyboard

8 comments:

  1. What a great experiment to extend the book! I love finding ways to extend books. Guess I will need to keep my eye out for this!

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  2. Thanks so much!! I really appreciate the feedback!! :)

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  3. Love this activity! Thanks for sharing...Marnie (Carrots are Orange)

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  4. Fun! This is theme for one of our Kids Science Labs Toddler classes! We don't have the kids sort the objects on a chart, but I think I'll have them do that next time. Thanks for the great ideas Tricia! Keep up the great blogging!

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  5. Thank you, this book is perfect for introducing this fun activity! Liz :)

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