Oceans have salt water

We continued to explore water and oceans today.

In art lab, students worked on adding sea creatures to their ocean painting and making the letter "t" with a paint brush on an easel. In writing lab, they traced star and fish stencils and carefully and with much precision and concentration they filled in their tracings with lines as a pre-writing skill.

For science lab the students learned that ocean water is salt water. We had 2 large bowls of water. They poured one cup of salt into a container, poured it into one of the bowls and then mixed it in. This bowl became our "ocean" salt water. They sampled the water with a tasting spoon. Then we had many items to explore. They felt each one and made a hypothesis (an idea you can test) about if it would sink or float. We took turns placing each item into the water and then into the sea water to check our predictions. One item, a blue craft bead was extra special - almost magical really! They watched as it sunk in the water bowl. In the salt water bowl though, it floated! We talked about how items floated better in salt water and introduced the word buoyancy. We will review this concept again in another exciting science lab yet to come.

Then we placed the items that floated in one basket: a wooden block, a craft stick (like a Popsicle stick) a feather, a Lego, a sponge, a plastic stencil-ruler tracer.

Items that sunk went into another basket: a quarter, a shell, a rock, a plastic gingerbread cookie from the kitchen center.

The special blue bead did not go in either basket since it sunk in the water but floated in the salt water.

Outside we played "Octopus, octopus may we cross your ocean?" They also played with moon sand today in the outside moon sand table.

At end circle time, we saw row, row, row your boat with partners and I introduced the hand clapping song "a sailor went to sea" Here is a video clip of Gabriella & Savannah trying to do the "Sailor went to sea" song.