Week 13- M&M Exploration

   

 Week 13- M&M Exploration

 Learning This Week:

This week during lab, we looked further into the M&M exploration activity. During the first week of physical science, we did an M&M lab where we put M&Ms into water and watched the color run off. This week we ran more tests to decide why this happens and what factors can play into it. We started by putting different colors of M&Ms onto a plate of room temperature water and noted which colors "ran off" quicker. To test this, we took pictures of the plate after 1 minutes, and then again after 2 minutes. We noticed that the red M&M dissolved quickest and the blue M&M dissolved the slowest. We tested the M&Ms again by putting them in sugar water and in cold water. We looked to see how these different water types affected the speed at which the M&Ms dissolved. After all of our trials, we saw that (in order from quickest to slowest) the M&Ms dissolved quicker starting in hot water, then in regular water, then in cold water, then in sugar water. 


Regular Water Test 

Application to Future Teaching: 

Our lab section this week was based on experimentation and observation. We were given a lot of freedom of how we wanted to conduct our experiment and test our data. My lab group chose to take pictures of our M&Ms after each minute they were in the water. I enjoyed having the freedom to do our experiment and test our hypothesis the way that we wanted and in a way that made the most sense for us. This is a teaching strategy that I would like to enact in my future classroom. I think this style of instruction is more engaging and exciting for students because they get to decide how they want to learn.  

Sugar Water Test

Questions for Further Study

1.) What are different controls we could put into this experiment to make it more accurate?

2.) Why do M&Ms dissolve slower in sugar water? 

Cold Water Test (1 minute) 


Comments

  1. Nicole HomrighausenApril 18, 2024 at 10:48 AM

    I find the question about controls that you ask to be very interesting. I too wonder about controls and how we go about doing that, especially with younger kids. I know that this experiment was geared towards older kids.

    I also liked this experiment because it gave the students a lot of capability to do their own work and make their on conclusions based on the evidence. I think that's how science classrooms should be run especially in elementary school.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ruth's BlogApril 18, 2024 at 11:03 AM

    Hi Ballie! first, your blog is so cute! I think it was really smart of your group to take a picture of the M&M's to compare. I wish my group would've done that because I think it would've made our experiment results more accurate.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anna's Science BlogApril 25, 2024 at 9:24 AM

    Hi Bailee! Nice job in this weeks lab. Our table also had the same question as to why the M&Ms dissolve slower in sugar water. Nice work!

    ReplyDelete

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