A Polar Bear's Blubber
>> Thursday, January 7, 2010
Our Itty Bitty Bookworm Bo's Curriculum Year 1 theme this week is bears. Tara has included a great science experiment depicting why polar bears don't get cold in the icy arctic water.
First we put ice bergs in our water and played around a bit experiencing the cold.
Then we put on a glove of blubber (lard).
And it really is amazing, but we couldn't feel the cold at all through all the fat in the ziploc.
The science lesson became a pouring lesson.
And then became a "sink or float" lesson.
By the way, we tried a banana, an apple, a lemon, and a pear and all the fruit but the pear floated. I thought that was kind of neat.
Finally, it became a "Wash the dishes for you, Mommy?" activity.
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12 comments:
That's a neat science experiment, and it was fun to see how it evolved into other activities =)
Thanks for sharing this fun experiment with us! I will have to remember this when we do our bear theme.
I just read about an experiment like this (somewhere - ??); it sounds really neat! I'm just wondering if there's some lard-less way to do it, lol. :) Looks like Bear had a great time with the water!
Oh my goodness...flashback! I remember doing this when I was in school! I love how it lead to other activities.
What fun !! She looks like she had a blast.
I love it when something we start grows and grows. I will have to try this one with Quince.
Funny - I also read about this experiment somewhere in the book, but now I cannot recall which book it was. I thought at the time that we will do it one of these days. Interestingly, I asked Anna the other day if she wants to play with ice, and she absolutely refused informing me that she doesn't like cold icy things. I like how your experiment transformed into several other things including float/sink experiment.
Ohhhh, how neat!! What a great experience AND experiment. Maddie would love to try this out.
I'm going to be doing this with my kids when we study penguins. I remember doing this with my first graders, and it got MESSY!
Great science lesson. Sweet Pea always wants to wash the dishes for me too. :)
I'd wondered if you'd posted this activity--here it is:-).
Wasn't it so much fun? We LOVED it! I'd never done this before--the Crisco part, my daughter said she'd done it a couple times over the years in public school. It was really neat.
Pretty funny, I see we both used glass bowls for our experiment.
Which IBB unit are you guys doing next week?
I love that idea with the water/crisco! I think I'm going to buy the IBB curriculum too. I am just undecided which one to get.
so fun! :)
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