We began by experimenting with heat energy. Students predicted what would happen to a Hershey's kiss after holding it in an open palm for 5 minutes versus holding it in a closed palm for 5 minutes. A lot of us thought that the Hershey's kiss would melt a lot in a closed palm. We were right! The heat energy our closed palms created melted the kisses!
Knowing that heat can produce an interesting result, we decided to see if we could use solar energy to heat a yummy snack! Students made solar ovens out of materials like pizza boxes, aluminum foil, plastic wrap and black paper. We set the solar ovens outside for a couple of hours and were able to eat some delicious, melty s'mores as an afternoon treat!
Next we wanted to see how heat reacted to some non-edible objects. We did an experiment where we compared what would happen to a balloon attached to a soda bottle that was white versus one that was attached to a black soda bottle. We thought that the balloon attached to the black bottle would probably do something like blow up or expand in the heat. We put the bottles in front of the space heater and watched the results!
Students have been realizing that wind energy is becoming a very popular form of renewable energy. We talked about how many things can be moved by the wind. We tested different objects outside to see which ones the wind would move and which items wouldn't move by the wind.
We noticed that boats use the wind to catch the sails and move across the water. We wanted to see if creating sails on cars would be an alternative to using gasoline! Kids designed sails and attached them to toy cars. We then used fan power to see how far the cars would move.
Wind can do so many things! We even used the power of our breath to create abstract wind paintings!
We had fun racing different objects to see how many breaths it would take to push it across the table.
After reading the inspiring trues stories of Energy Island and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, we decided to try and make our own wind turbines. These turbines are actually powered by heat!
Sound energy was another form of energy that we investigated. We figured out ways to see sound working by holding up a homemade drum with salt on top next to a speaker. We could see the salt bouncing around in response to the sound waves that were coming from the speaker.
A lot of us are thinking about how to use what we know about renewable forms of energy in our next project, Create Your Own Civilization :)
