A Little Science Fun for Your Friday!

If you've read our blog before, you know that we live for science experiment days! We've done all sorts of experiments from simulating oil spills and volcanoes to investigating changes in the weather and testing hypotheses about how mold grows and how gravity works. With each new lesson and experiment, we are proving that these topics are ACCESSIBLE and RELEVANT to students of ALL cognitive levels. This week's science experiment was all about equal balance. This month we are focusing on laws and rules for our school, home and community. We began this study by talking all about equality. What better way to illustrate this concept than through a science experiment!

Here's what our Unique Learning Systems experiments look like...

 

We quickly got to work gathering materials and setting up the experiment. We used bears instead of spoons to illustrate the concepts of equality and inequality. We made our own version of a scale using a hanger, a yardstick, some cups and a few pieces of string. 

 

We hypothesized that using the same number of bears would make our 'scales' equal. 

Next we set to work testing out this hypothesis.

 

 This was a great opportunity to practice our math skills (counting bears, greater than, less than), fine motor skills (grasping and placing items into cups), receptive communication skills (following spoken directions) and social skills (interacting with peers).

We tried all different scenarios by changing the number of bears in each cup.

Finally we evaluated our hypothesis and discovered that we were correct! We talked a little bit more about what it means to be equal (in both the context of our experiment as well as in life).

This was a fun, hands-on way of illustrating a sometimes difficult concept. My group did a great job following each step of the experiment and recording our conclusions. As always, we were thankful to have our peers around to lend a hand!

Happy Friday!