The Rookery

We had a great time launching straw rockets (I can't believe I keep forgeting to take video!) on Tuesday.
 Our first launches were right before spring break and I allowed students to openly explore the basic construction of a straw rocket.  They could make any changes they wished between launches.

For our second series of launches, the students built a rocket and then launched it from a variety of angles, recording the data from each launch on a graph.

I scheduled 20 minutes for a wrap up conversation in which I hoped that students would recognize the bell curve of their results, identify 45 degrees as the optimal launch angle for distance and then analyze any data that didn't fit the expected curve.  We began right on track and then the Herons exploded with questions.  Soon we were trying to figure out why 45 degrees was the optimal launch angle.  "It's like goldilocks!  It's just right."  "Yeah, if it's too low it hits the ground too soon, if it's too high, it doesn't go forward at all."  I introduced the idea of force vectors and the students identified the launcher's air puff was a forward force and gravity as a downward force.

Then, with the simple question, "What exactly is gravity?" and my response, "We know an awful lot about what gravity does.  We know that every atom has some gravity so that the bigger the mass, the greater the gravity.  But WE DON'T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT GRAVITY IS." The Herons' curiosity took over again.  In the following 20 minutes we covered why the earth doesn't crash into the sun, why the outer planets orbit so much slower than the inner planets, how the solar system formed, magnetism, the tilt of the earth's axis, why we stand on our feet and not our hands, why balloons rise, escape velocity, the big bang, where the moon came from and several other "related" topics.

At the end, it was time for recess and the Herons responded with a resounding, "NO!"  This is such an exciting age to teach and explore with.  They love playing with really big ideas and trying to put together all the pieces of their nascent abstract understanding of the world.  I hope you have a lot of dinner conversations that take off like this one did!

One last note, today as we talked about the science MCAs that 5th graders will take on Monday and Tuesday of next week, one student remarked, "Gee, I hope there's no physics on it."  Another asked, "What is physics anyway?"  Then I explained that physics is exactly what we were learning about with the straw rockets and that they not only had thought about physics, they'd had some great questions about astrophysics, too (and cosmology and quantum physics…)