Egg Science
4/27/2019
We started off this week with the question "what is an egg?" Together we did a class dissection of eggs. Ms. Bookman helped us through our dissection and we learned that there were more parts to an egg than we thought! By the end of the activity our explores were able to identify the shell, the shell membrane, the albumen (egg white), the yolk, the protein chords (which hold the yolk in place), and the small white dot that is where an embryo would grow. I was impressed with how the explorers investigated and asked questions. Eggs are a wonderful topic to study. But they can also be tricky in that eggs are fragile and therefore hard for preschoolers to explore on their own. Doing an egg dissection lets students explore and learn and wonder and answer their own questions in a integrative way, being both student-led and teacher guided. After watching Ms. Bookman and myself model egg dissection and show all the parts, each student got a chance to crack their own egg. Some students carefully inspected each part with a single finger, others attempted to pull apart and separate all the egg parts, and others dived in with two hands wondering about the textures and what happens when it is all mixed together. We talked a lot this week about how we can be scientists. We learned that scientists make observations by combining what they see and know. We also learned that scientists use the scientific method to answer questions. We used these processes all week as we did egg experiments, tested egg strength, explored our new egg science center, attempted to model the process of making chrysalises, and did our egg dissections.
When we tested egg strength we used the morning question to generate a hypothesis for the question "Are you stronger than an egg?" Everyone guessed "yes" and had insightful reasons why: "we have muscles, eggs do not," "a baby chick can break an egg and I am stronger than a baby chick." To test our hypothesis each student took turns seeing how many textbooks they could hold. The data ranged from 3-7 books. We then stacked textbooks on top of 4 eggs. The eggs held up 7 books before they smashed! In the conclusion of this experiment the students decided that eggs needed to be strong to protect the baby growing inside and because the mama sits on the eggs. Our second experiment was to soak eggs in different mixtures to see what happened to the shell. There was excitement every day as things changed in the solutions. The result was one disappeared shell, one that changed colors, and one that stayed the same. This generated even more questions to investigate about why this happened. Comments are closed.
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April 2021
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