Valentines Science Lab: Changing the Color of Flowers

I thought this could be a fun science lab for my students, and with Valentine's Day right around the corner I thought it would be a perfect time to give it a try.

In this lab students will be changing the color of white flowers, by giving them colored water. All you will need is
- White carnations
- Food coloring
- Water
- Vases (water bottles/cups work great)

For this lab I would have my class split into 4 groups. Two groups would get blue food coloring, and two groups would get red food coloring. One of the blue group would use warm water and one group would use cold water. And the same thing with the red group.

Each group would add 20 drops of food coloring into a 1/2 cup of water.

They would then place the stem of their flower into the water.

I would then have the students predict what will happen to the flowers. Which ones will turn more quickly? Which ones will have a brighter color?

Each hour we would check on the flowers. We would observe what is happening and put the notes into our science journals.

The flowers should change color within a few hours. The flowers in warm water should turn more quickly.  Sometimes it does take over night.

Let me know how this worked in your class!

Battleship Valentines Style!!

With Valentine's Day approaching I've been thinking about different activities I could do in my class. I found this game and thought it would be perfect because we are talking about ordered pairs in math. Hope you enjoy!

The main idea of this game is to have students be able to identify ordered pairs. This is a variation of the classic board game Battleship. I made a simple game board by creating a table using word.

I would pair my students and give each a game board and 5 kisses (you could use any candy you would like I had kisses so that's what I used). Put a folder between the students so they cannot see each others board.

Have the students place their candy on their board.

Have the students take turns guessing ordered pairs. If they guess a square that has a piece of candy, they get the candy. The first student who gets all the candy from the others board wins!

Superbowl Commercial Activity

So Superbowl Sunday is coming up and even though I am not a sports fan I cannot forget about it in my class. I thought it would be a fun writing/creative activity for my students to create a Superbowl commercial. This will be a group project. I supply the products for the students to advertise. Each group will be given a product and they must create a commercial for that product. This project will take a few days to complete. On the first day the students will brainstorm and complete a graphic organizer. The second day the students will write out the scripts.  The third day the students will be able to make props for the commercial. And the final day the groups will act out their commercial and I will record it using a flip camera. The next day I will show the commercials on our smart board.

  Some guidelines that I have set up for this project is that the commercial has to be within 30-45 seconds (I tell them that they only have enough money to buy that amount of air time), all members of the group must be in the commercial, and all parts of the project (graphic organizer, scrips, props, final product) will be graded. I think this will be a fun and interesting project for my students, let me know if you have any fun Superbowl project ideas.