What is Science?

 The class cheered last week when I announced that with 3rd quarter beginning, we also begin science!  We talked about what the word science means to us.  The class had many replies: doing experiments, learning about nature, learning about the earth, asking questions, designing things, working with chemicals, learning about animals, learning about how things work, and much more!  Our first science unit is designed to take students through the scientific method.  We started with a question, designed an experiment, made a hypothesis, ran our experiment, and analyzed our data to form a conclusion. 

Our first question was: "How can we keep bananas fresher longer?"  Our experiment used 3 different methods: putting a banana in a sealed plastic bag, putting a banana in the fridge, and wrapping a banana stem with plastic wrap.  We checked on our bananas each day and wrote down our observations.  We noticed that the banana in the fridge turned brown very quickly, the banana with the plastic wrap formed brown spots throughout the week, while the banana in the bag looked the freshest the longest.  On our final day we peeled the bananas to find that the 3 bananas on the inside, all looked pretty similar.  Our conclusion was the banana in the plastic bag and the banana in the fridge were equally fresh on the inside.

Our second experiment asked the question: "How can we make gummy bears grow the most?"  We tried plain water, lemon water, sugar water, and vinegar water.  The students each made a hypothesis.  Some predicted sugar water since gummy bears are made of sugar.  We weighed and measured each gummy bear before and after.  The results showed that vinegar water grew the gummy bear the most.