5th Grade: This week in science, we've continued our learning about how plants make energy (and gain mass) and how other organisms use that energy. We did an experiment with yeast. By giving the yeast sugar (in the form of crumbled up Chips Ahoy cookies), they became active and started cellular respiration. This process produces carbon dioxide as a waste product, which caused our bags of yeast and warm water to puff up! We used a tool to measure that gas produced as well as the amount of gas produced by the control experiment (no cookies), which was zero in most cases.
Key questions to ask your student:
- What organisms make their own energy? How can we tell that they are making energy? (Gain mass, grow)
- In the experiment with yeast, how did we know that the yeast were burning sugar? (They produced carbon dioxide as a waste product)
- Can you think of other organisms that produce carbon dioxide as a waste product of cellular respiration? (Most animals, including humans!)
4th Grade: This week, we have focused entirely on designing experiments to determine what sort of environment our beetles and pill bugs prefer. We placed the animals in runways with two types of conditions and watched to see which condition they moved to. Early in the week, we examined sunlight versus darkness and later in the week, we had the animals choose between dry and moist soil.
Key questions:
- What abiotic factors can influence the isopods and beetles? (amount of light, temperature, amount of moisture, soil quality, etc)
- What environments did your isopods prefer? (They prefer dark, moist environments)
- What environments did your beetles prefer? (They preferred dark environments, but didn't seem to have a preference about soil moisture.)
- What other experiments could you set up to explore environmental preference? (Answers may vary, but we discussed in class exploring temperature, food, and soil type preferences)
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