Skip to main content

Magic Tricks with Science


I did this recently with a fourth grade class as part of a "Magic Tricks with Science Day" related to the unit they were in - Light, Magnets, and Electricity (big shout out to Mrs. Lauricella who is always game to have me come in and teach her class!).
The day went something like this....
- Reviewed three things light can do when it hits an object (refract, reflect, and absorb)
- Discussed how when light refracts it can make an object appear bent in water. Students then got to pour water in a clear plastic cup and put a pencil in to observe this.
- I then told students that it can appear to bend other things as well and I did the trick above in the video. The teacher and I staged this elaborate senario where we were arguing about who was the best teacher and we decided to let the "magic arrow" decide. The kids LOVED it (we said they could try it at home with their siblings...as in who did mom like the most :)
- Students then got to draw arrows and try it themselves on each other
- After that we did the jello secret message activity (relating it to light absorption and refraction). See early post here. We used the coloring sheet from the Gems Color Analyzer Book.
It was a pretty fast paced activity filled day with the kids (which is always a good thing!)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Digital Citizen Cards

This project idea came from a monthly challenge put out by Adobe Express. We have the free EDU version deployed in our district and I thought this might be fun to try with a class. I liked that there was a prize element where the students could win a classroom set of hero cards  and it tied in with Digital Citizenship Week (October 17-21).  I teamed up with an elementary technology lab teacher and we decided to try it with one fifth grade class.  We looked over the available templates and decided we liked the layout of the 6-8 template the best (because they had to list advice for staying safe online).  One of the best things about these Adobe monthly challenge templates is that they can be modified. The revised template can then be sent to students via a link or through Google Classroom.  All the templates for this challenge Adobe gives you a sample template with sample wording but we wanted students to come up with their own wording. Neither one of us was ke...

Random Idea - Website Domain Name

For the past two years I have purchased a yearly subscription to a stand alone website (School World) which I love. I did this because our district was using a very nonuser friendly website for its teachers and I was tired of not being able to do what I want with the website they had given me. I got the idea of a separate website from one of my son's teachers who had done the same thing years ago, she used a different teacher website then School World but it was the same principle. The yearly subscription rate for my own website was $35 and was extremely reasonable. I simply provided a link on my district website to my new site. The district did not have a problem with this. Several teachers were doing it. I am one of these "don't ask...don't tell" teachers so even if there was a problem I wasn't going to find out about it :) Last year the rest of the fourth grade team purchased subscriptions to the site as well. We also purchased our own domain names throug...

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.