Science... I'm Falling for You!

We are working on our unit on Forces and Motion and we have been doing different experiments.  We started by reading 
What Are Scientists?  The class then drew a picture of themselves as scientists in a field that interested them.  The pictures were quite cute.  We have some budding scientists!  

We talked about the fact that scientists study everything.  They ask lots of questions.  They do experiments, make hypotheses, discuss their findings, and ask more questions!  

We have been experimenting with forces - push and pull.  We have talked about friction and gravity.  

Yesterday we did experiments with dropping 2 objects and making predictions about which would fall faster?  The items included ping pong balls, marbles, a shotput, erasers, pencils, a feather, paperclips, and paper. 

Experiment materials

Irini tests her hypothesis.  

Tyler tries dropping two items at the same time! 

Mehr drops the items while Will looks at the results.

Finch records her results on her data sheet.  

Then, three third grade classes (Mr. Kuehl's, Mrs. Sheehan's, and our own) met together to discuss our results.  We learned about Galileo and his work in the 1600s with gravity.  

Mr. K demonstrates using a shotput and a marble! 

We finished by watching a video of an astronaut conducting Galileo's experiment using a feather and a hammer on the moon.  

Click here to see the video on YouTube.  

After our experiments we wrote about what we learned from falling objects.  Here is what we concluded.