What Is The Big Ideas Of A Teacher's Guide For Clay Boat

The big ideas of Teacher’s Guide for Clay Boats: Experiments with Floating, Sinking, and Simple Volume Relationships curriculum are displacement, density and buoyancy. Displacement happens when an object is fully submerged in a liquid, pushing it aside and taking its place. Students are exposed to displacement in the first activity of this curriculum. They are able to observe this as a piece of clay is placed into lukewarm water. The clay pushes the water aside as it begins to sink. Buoyancy is the ability to float. While students are never exposed to this terminology, students explore buoyancy in the first three lessons. In lesson one, students use a piece of clay to construct their own floating containers. Lesson two consists of students manipulating their designs to explore variables that will affect the flotation of their boats.

Students will notice this as they place uniform weights in their floating boats. Density is the amount of space an object takes when compared to how much it weighs. In activity two students are introduced and asked to consider the weight of their boats as they compare them one another. However in our three linked lessons, second grade students will not be introduced to this big idea. Instead they are beginning to explore the relationship between buoyancy and density. In the last activity (of the curriculum), students are supposed to be creating new boats out of aluminum foil paper. Even though we will not have students performing this activity, the sixth activity of the curriculum allows student to experiment with density as they are presented with new materials. As they are supposed to be creating new boats out of aluminum foil paper, they are experimenting with different densities in comparison to their clay