Day 79, Lauren Blum, 4th Grade Science

Student Created Labs

Recently, strange things have been happening in 4^th grade. The students have taken over and created their own science labs!! Classmates joined forces to come up with their best lab demonstration to show weathering, erosion, and/or deposition. Each group went “shopping” for materials in the science lab, set up the lab, and presented it to the class.

Cotton balls represent rocks that get washed downstream by a river and eventually end up in a new location.

Here is what two students had to say about the lab:

Our wreathing, erosion, and deposition lab gave us the ability to come up with a lab by ourselves. Instead of us following someone else’s steps, we got to create our own steps! It was really fun and I hope we could do something like it again! It was challenging, but that’s what made it fun! See, what we did was, we got to come up with a way to show weathering, erosion, or deposition. Then we got to show it to the whole class! It was like an exciting way of learning about science! –Taylor

My group made our science demonstration for erosion and deposition. We compiled our ideas. One person’s idea was to have a paper towel tube with sand in it and pour water into it which would demonstrate erosion because as our teacher taught, erosion is when something like sand is picked up and moved to a new location. I thought that if we added a tank and some spoons that we could show deposition. So we stacked some books on top of each other and we did use a paper towel tube with sand in it. Then we poured water into it and left some behind. After that we had the tube leading to a big bucket with water in it. We also put rocks in it because we knew that when rock hits water it releases some sad. When the sand floated to the bottom we knew we managed to show erosion and deposition. – Zyonne

A beach of sand and rock that was eroded away by the waves (bucket being shaken back and forth).