Head O’ Meadow Students Learn

‘Matter Matters’

By Eliza Hallabeck

Walking from classroom to classroom on Wednesday, May 5, students in each of the third grade classes at Head O’ Meadow learned Matter Matters.

This was the first time the program involved each third grade class being broken up and going from one lesson to another with a different body of students than the regular classes.

“They’ve been doing great,” said teacher Susan Ruddock as she oversaw students predicting and weighing gum and sugarless gum to see if the sugar would cause the gum to weight more after chewing.

Ms Ruddock said the students were learning to use information they had been taught in a practical way.

“Like real scientists,” said Ms Ruddock, “and that is what we want them to do.”

Working together, Colby Delia and Jake Raiani said they predicted the gum with sugar would weigh less than the sugarless gum after being chewed.

“Because you are going to be taking out the sugar,” said Colby.

Student Gabrielle Calbo disagreed, and predicted the sugarless gum would weigh less, “because sugar gum may have more materials to make it stronger.”

Students were surprised when Ms Ruddock, for time purposes, demonstrated the final weighing of gum with and without sugar. The two types of gum ended up weighing the same.

Across the hall in Bonita Cartoun’s classroom, students were making predictions on what would happen to water, a water and oil mixture, and cream when shaken.

“It will just fuzz up,” said student Henry Vaughan about the water.

Jake Meyer said he predicted the water and oil mixture would stay the same.

And Liza Gentrop said the cream when shaken would also stay the same.

Under Ms Cartoun’s guidance, students shook containers of the mixtures. Later, when entering Ms Ruddock’s classroom, students shared they had created butter by mixing the cream.

In Chrissie Pierce’s classroom, students were asked to answer how heating and cooling would affect matter.

“Scientists use properties to sort and describe matter,” Ms Pierce told the students.

She also explained she had learned an interesting thing that day.

“All matter is magnetic,” said Ms Pierce. “However, some matter is more magnetic than others, so scientists sort materials by how magnetic they are.”

Across the hall, students in Tina Murphy’s classroom created their own molecules of H2O.

“A molecule is when you join more than one atom together,” said Ms Murphy.

After explaining different molecules to students, Ms Murphy had students build their own molecules.

“Our atoms are also known as gum drops,” said Ms Murphy, “but are now no longer gum drops. They are hydrogen and oxygen.”1