Floating and Sinking Eggs

Starting off posts regarding our egg unit we've been working on for a while... Today we took the incubating eggs off the automatic turner in preparation of hatching.

The center eggs were old ones, so after 18 days in the incubator as heat indicators, they are good and rotten. PERFECT for our sink or float experiment.

I asked the children if they thought the new egg, straight out of the carton and white, would sink or float. We discussed it, and the concepts of sink and float, with the sinkers and floaters votes equally divided. Even the 2s had opinions on this. Then we discussed the yucky old egg and what it might do. 

It did help that they were different colors for the children to be able to easily see which one was which. Then the older girls placed each one in water and we saw what happened.

We observed the air bubbles coming off the eggs and discussed why that was.

I asked if they wanted to smash the yucky old egg and smell it's stinkiness, but they declined. They trusted me on that one.

SKILLS: 

Science density, gases, air, rotting, water displacement, volume, floating vs sinking, prediction, deduction, hypothesis, classification [old/new, sinker/floater]

Math graphing, counting, one-to-one correspondence [glasses to eggs to children who put them in], prediction, deduction, classification [old/new, sinker/floater], shapes: oval, cylinder [tumbler], rectangle [tray], circle [tops of tumblers]

Language vocabulary, adjectives, placement words, colors, explaining their vote

Observation

Tags: preschool, childcare, daycare, pre-k, prek, kindergarten, homeschool, eggs, egg theme, egg unit, Easter, float sink, science, spring