Investigations about surface tension
Year 1 started to learn about the properties of water by investigating surface tension. We discussed times when water is soft (gentle rain) and when water is hard (when you do a belly flop into the pool!). To see how strong water can be we started by using a pipette to drop water onto 5, 10 and 50 cent coins. We began by predicting how many drops would fit onto each coin before the water tipped off the coins. We had predictions between 1 and 100! The children had some very good explanations as to why 100 was an impossible outcome. There was lots of counting and nervous excitement as we added our drops. It was exciting to see a bubble start to form on the coin and after a few goes we could tell when we were close to on overflow. In the end we found out you could add about 20 drops to a 5c coin, 30 drops to a 10c coin and 60 drops to a 50c coin.