Floaters and Sinkers

We had a great, wet time today playing with floaters and sinkers. First we gathered stuff that we thought would either float or sink. These were our predictions which is a fancy science word for guess.

We recorded our predictions in a small notebook. I was really impressed with the variety of ways that the kids recorded their predictions from tracing the objects to drawing with different colored crayons.
Then we tested our predictions. This part was great fun. We used another science tool, tweezers, to reclaim our objects from the water.

We double checked our predictions and found that for most part, our predictions were correct. We did have some surprises. The rubber bands did not float. A few folks thought that the Legos would sink and were surprised that they float nicely.

Our final challenge was to make a boat that could float as many pennies as possible. One participant, Lucas, was able to float 23 pennies on a piece of tin foil!

If you want to check out some other things to float and sink, go see my previous post here.