Children are such natural scientists! Their minds are inherently curious and so much of their daily lives involves posing questions, testing theories and critically thinking through the results. Guided science opportunities encourage this way of thinking. Through experiments and explorations, vocabulary is built. A greater threshold for tolerating, learning from and even welcoming failures is developed. The practical process of taking a question, setting up and testing an experiment and learning from the results is refined. Oh, and it's fun!
As we were "visiting" England in our Around the World unit and learning about bridges, this experiment seemed like a great way to incorporate those themes into our weekly science activity:
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| Recording the Process: We often use chart paper for this or a journal. I encourage drawing and dictating about our experiments as well, as this is a precursor to being able to write about them independently. |
Building Bridges: Strong, Stronger and Strongest
We used:
- Magnetiles for the base of the bridge
- glass stones (you could also use pennies or some other small, consistently sized object that you can use as weights)
- construction paper, card-stock and cardboard, all cut to the same size
Whenever you wish to run an experiment, it is important to focus on testing one variable. In a laboratory, you can truly refine an experiment to test one variable at a time without other factors interfering. At home (and with children) this can be a little more challenging, so we do our best to have ONE thing that will change throughout the experiment, and to make sure everything else stays the SAME. In this experiment, we made sure the bridge base was the same height and width each time and always used the same number of Magnetiles on either size. We kept the area of the bridge top the same even as the material changed. We chose an object as our test subject (glass stones) that are all about the same size and weight. Pennies would also work well for this, but not, for instance, a variety of different coins at one time.
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| Making Predictions |
I set out our materials and explained that we wanted to find out which material would make the strongest bridge. I introduced our three vocabulary words, "strong, stronger, strongest." I invited my son to make a prediction about what would happen during the experiment and explained that this is "an educated guess." It was OK to be right or wrong and we were trying to find out which material would hold the most glass stones before caving in. Interestingly, my son accurately predicted the results of our experiment, though at 2.5 years old, I think this was more coincidence! My main objective in encouraging a prediction phase was just to introduce the concept of making a guess beforehand and being OK whether that was "right" or "wrong" in the end.
When testing bridges with young, Magnetile-loving toddlers, I highly recommend having extra blocks on hand and extra stones as well. Tinkering with materials is also a part of experimenting and exploring!
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| Even after our experiment was complete, he had a lot of fun building, testing and tinkering with his own bridges! |
As I demonstrated and talked through testing each of the three bridge surfaces, I encouraged my junior scientist to help. I showed him how to place the stones in the middle of the structure. I invited him to join me in counting out our results. Science experiments with very junior scientists are not ever flawless, but the main idea is to introduce scientific concepts and thinking. Foremost, I want for the children I teach (especially my own) to love science activities--I care more about that than I do about "accuracy."
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| Construction paper |
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| Card-stock |
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| Cardboard: Still going... |
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| WOW! The cardboard is strong enough to hold ALL of the stones PLUS the plastic dish! |
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| Our results! |
Happy building, experimenting and playing!
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