March 19, 2012 Preschool Science News

Deer Park Shore Parents,

Hello again from the Science room!

Over the past few weeks we’ve been talking about our Five Senses, especially our senses of hearing, sight and touch.

HEARING: We read some books on sound and how our ears work. We learned how we have an outer, middle and inner ear and what each part does. Our outer ear is shaped the way it is in order to catch sound waves. In the middle ear we have an eardrum which vibrates when sound waves hit it sending signals to the inner ear and then to the brain which tells us what we’ve heard. We did an experiment demonstrating what happens to the eardrum when exposed to sound waves using a bowl with plastic wrap to represent the eardrum. We then put some rice on top of the plastic wrap and watched the rice jump and dance as the children created sound waves with a cookie sheet and a wooden spoon. We also demonstrated how sound waves can travel with a half soda bottle sound wave maker and a candle. Ask the children what happened when we tapped on the soda bottle. We had a lot of fun playing some sound games in the classroom. All the children had a wonderful sense of hearing as well as sound recognition!

SIGHT: We read some books on the eye and seeing and learned that just as our ears catch sound waves, our eyes catch light beams or rays. We made a model of the eye using a round water pitcher, a magnifying glass and a flashlight and talked about what each part of the eye does and how they all work together to create the images that we see. Ask what kind of image the children saw on our tissue paper “retina”. We also had some fun with a few optical illusions!

TOUCH: We read a book called Touch and used describing words to tell how we thought various objects in the book would feel. Then we did our “Feely Box” activity and tried to guess what an object inside the box was using only our sense of touch.

Last week we touched on the topic of wind since March is typically a very windy month and this year is no exception. We watched the video Sid the Science Kid-the Wind Did It and talked about what causes wind to blow. We then did some windy activities including wind painting through a straw, blowing on water to make waves and move paper boats and using straws once again to blow and make patterns in piles of salt.

Be on the lookout in the weeks ahead for the letters U, V and W as they stand for the Universe, Volcanoes and Waves!

Sincerely,