The RISE of the EGG

There is this teaching method in science called the 5E learning cycle... pretty much 5 words that all start with... you guessed it...the Letter E! I feel like I am back on Sesame street, today's letter is the letter E!

The first stage of the 5E is 'Engagement': we watched a video of people floating in a salty lake and a bowling ball that also was floating. That was engaging.

The second stage of the 5E is Exploration. We discussed what we would need to do to make an egg float in water. My partner and I wrote out procedures and filled in a table with information. We were questioned by our professor throughout our writing of procedures and while we were working on throwing an egg in some regular water.. then salty water, then some really salty water. ('Evaluation')
 400 Milliliters of water and 3 Tablespoons of salt later, we had a floating egg.  I kept randomly shouting "THE RISE of the EGG!" because I thought it was funny, my partner laughed (perhaps sympathetically), but she's a good sport. 

Next, we were to 'Explain' what we thought the density of an egg is. We have no idea what the density of the egg is, however we had an idea of the density of our water 400 grams of water 51 grams of salt, divided by 400 milliliters of water and we were at around 1.125 or something about that. So we know the egg must be less dense than the water. This is the part where the professor narrowed in his questioning to get us to focus, it wasn't how many T's of salt or how many Mils of water, but what was the density of the egg.. and unknown... He put a table up on the smart board and we filled in the table, that was another way he was 'Evaluating' our understandings and he was able to clarify misunderstandings. 

The E 'Evaluating' goes throughout the lesson, evaluating is fluid and never ends...

The final E is 'extending or elaboration'.We discussed as a whole group about how we could make our experiment better, ways we could test more accurately. I won't be doing this, it is not homework and I am too busy...

This week is crazy busy, sometimes I wonder why I do these things to myself. I think for the challenge of it all...