Science of Week 20 in CTG

After feeling like a failure so much with science, this weeks science went better. Since there were so many experiments in one day, I thought I would do a separate entry.

We did not do the "It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's SUPER Feather" experiment (no feather handy) or the "Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem...Rubbery Bones?" experiment (no bones - we only buy boneless chicken breasts).

The "Up, Up, and Away" experiment was probably the most challenging, but we were finally able to get it to balance. We tried plastic forks, but they were too light compared to the weight of the clay. So, here is what you will need:

Then we followed the instructions in the book. I had to tweak the forks quite a bit, but we did finally get it to balance. Here is one of me holding the cup:

Here it is setting down. You can see the fork on the right is just barely above the counter-top. So, it was close:

The weight of the forks would pull down in the clay and the weight of the clay and forks on the toothpick would make it move in the clay as it balanced on the edge of the glass so, you had to be kind of quick. Several times I had to pull all the stuff out of the clay and reform the ball. Here is a view from the top - you can see how the forks were starting to pull down and stretch the clay; you can also see how close I had to put the ball of clay to the edge of the glass:

The "Glide and Lift" experiment was relatively easy. It helped to get a yard stick to draw a line along the diagonal of the paper to be able to fold it better. Here is our glider:

Here is Rabbit making an attempt to toss it off our balcony:

You can see that with this toss, the glider looped up. It did take some practice to get it going out rather than up. We are fortunate to have an open floor plan so we had a "balcony" to toss the glider off. If you don't have a balcony, standing up on a chair would probably give the same effect.

I tossed the glider a couple of times from the balcony, and one time it landed right on the hook of our coat rack! We probably laughed for 5 minutes over this!

The final experiment was called "Winging It." From the instructions we couldn't tell if we should tape the edges together so they lined up, or if we should tape the shorter side down to the longer side. We tried both, and decided taping the edges together so they lined up was what they wanted, so it looked like this:

The only bad part about this experiment was getting dizzy from all that spinning. Here is our wing in action:

So, 3 fun experiments. It probably took us a good 45 minutes or so to do them, but well worth it for the laughter and fun.