Thursday, January 7, 2010

A Polar Bear's Blubber

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.



12 comments:

  1. That's a neat science experiment, and it was fun to see how it evolved into other activities =)

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  2. Thanks for sharing this fun experiment with us! I will have to remember this when we do our bear theme.

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  3. 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!

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  4. Oh my goodness...flashback! I remember doing this when I was in school! I love how it lead to other activities.

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  5. 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.

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  6. 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.

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  7. Ohhhh, how neat!! What a great experience AND experiment. Maddie would love to try this out.

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  8. 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!

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  9. Great science lesson. Sweet Pea always wants to wash the dishes for me too. :)

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  10. 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?

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  11. 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.

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