First Grade Science Fun

This week I was home for spring break and I spent a few days helping in a first grade class at an elementary school in Williamsburg. It was a lot of fun and the kids were SO cute! The first graders were finishing up their science unit on matter this week, and we did several fun activities about solids, liquids, and gases, including making root beer floats, "cooking" Jello, and playing with Oobleck.

Yesterday we made root beer floats and talked about how the ice cream is a solid, the root beer is a liquid, and the bubbles that appeared when we poured the root beer on top of the ice cream are a gas. Then the class made a T chart listing different qualities of each type of matter and wrote a short story about what type of matter they would like to be - for example one little girl wrote, "I am air. I am a gas. I would like to be air because then I could go flying through the sky" Another student wrote, "I am root beer. I am a liquid. I want to be root beer because I could drink myself". Then this morning the kids helped their teacher make Jello and talked about the powder (a solid) dissolving, the steam rising from the boiling water, and the Jello solidifying and changing from a liquid into a solid while it was in the refrigerator. These were both simple (and yummy) activities that provided real examples of the different states of matter.

Another science activity that we did this week was the "Oobleck" experiment, which is based on the book Bartholomew and the Oobleck by Dr. Seuss. I read this story (which is VERY long) to the class while the teacher covered the tables with paper and got ready for the kids to play with their own Oobleck. In the story, the king is bored with the sun, fog, rain, and snow that usually come from the sky so he orders his royal magicians to create something new to fall from the sky. The magicians comply with his request, and their new creation is a green sticky goo called Oobleck, which eventually gets stuck to everything in the town and creates a big gooey mess. The Oobleck continues falling in bigger and bigger globs until the king finally realizes that he has caused the whole problem by asking for this goo and then admits his mistake. As soon as the king says the simple words "I'm sorry", sun comes out and the Oobleck disappears, adding a moral lesson to go along with the science experiment.

This gooey green slime is easy to make; all you need is water, cornstarch, and a little food coloring. Click here for a recipe for making Oobleck. The 1st grade teacher had made the Oobleck ahead of time, which seemed like a very good idea with young children. The Oobleck was a little messy, but the kids thought it was really cool and we managed to keep it mainly on the paper covering the tables. We discovered that Oobleck has properties of both liquids and solids at the same time. Like a liquid, it molds to the shape of the container that you put it in and if you hold it in your hand it will start to drip. If you press quickly on the Oobleck with your finger, it will be hard like a solid and your finger will not go into the Oobleck. Here are links to 2 Oobleck lesson plans that I found online:

• Discovering the Properties of Oobleck
• Oobleck cooperative learning activity

These lessons are designed for upper elementary students, but they could easily be adapted for use with 1st or 2nd graders as well.

These activities were all a lot of fun for both me and the students. The kids learned a lot about matter and the activities seemed to increase their understanding about the different states of matter. I will definitely consider doing all 3 of them with my own students in the future.