Science gets a little squishy at Modesto’s Wilson Elementary
What is slime, anyway?
Kindergartners learning the difference between solids, liquids and gasses got thrown a curve blob Tuesday. A science teacher visiting Wilson Elementary School had them create two types of slime semisolids and guess which was which.
There was no wrong answer. The point was to get the youngsters in Deanna Salomon’s to start thinking about how to classify things, said educator Elsbeth Kersh of the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Wilson Elementary used $2,000 of school program money and a community donor gave $1,800 to bring science activities from Berkeley to the central Modesto campus.
I’ve had parents call. Their kids came home and started conversations about electric circuits.
Principal Sue McHann
Each grade chose its own activity, matched to coming science standards, said Principal Sue McHann – electrical circuitry for older kids, live animals for first-graders. Kindergarten teachers chose the states of matter, whether something was a liquid, a solid or a gas.
The kids donned safety goggles, measuring simple ingredients into plastic bags and mushing the closed bags to make a contained mess of colorful slime. A second experiment made crystal-clear insta-glop in a plastic cup that kids could slip between their fingers.
To start off the program, Kersh showed different examples of each and asked kids what they could tell her about each group. Kids had answers for her: one group was all sitting on a yellow paper. The rocks and sand were all the same color.
I think the main point is solids, liquids and gases. I don’t think we’ve talked about gases much.
Matthew Holson
kindergarten parentAll good answers, she said, but could we stick our fingers through the rock? Could we stick a finger into the shampoo?
That poking property turns out to be a good way to classify states of matter. Those common-sense questions are something parents can do if they want to turn a daily chore into a family science lesson.
“You can take ingredients like sand and marbles and mix them together. Or if you’re mixing a cake, you have flour – that’s a powdered solid – and milk and eggs. Do they change when they’re mixed together?” Kersh suggested.
It’s the focus on figuring things out logically that matters, even if the answers are a little complicated.
What is slime? We looked it up: The tricky answer is slime is officially a non-Newtonian fluid, according to the Exploratorium website, www.exploratorium.edu. That means its viscosity changes as force is applied to it. So it is a kind of liquid that acts like a solid when squished. Quicksand is also a non-Newtonian fluid and, good to know, swimming very slowly toward solid ground works best.
Nan Austin: 209-578-2339, @NanAustin
This story was originally published September 30, 2015 at 3:30 PM with the headline "Science gets a little squishy at Modesto’s Wilson Elementary."