Buoyancy and icebergs

We've been reading about boats and barrels floating, in our Five in a Row book for this week, Ping by Marjorie Flack.

This has been a springboard for exploring buoyancy. Such a wonderful excuse to throw everything in the bath tub-yes, that did include a rather dirty stone.

 The children enjoyed predicting what would and wouldn't float. We discovered that full cartons sink and empty ones float. The empty ones are brilliant models for why boats float.

Ice is always good for tasting and exploring. We made model icebergs-some small (ice cubes) and some larger (using small containers). We coloured our largest with red food colouring-blue would have been better but some people do like making various coloured concoctions so that it had disappeared.

It was more difficult to predict whether ice would float but it did. The large iceberg showed really well how much of the structure is under water.

This was a fascinating springboard leading to talk about the Titanic and the structure of ice.

Mr Exuberance loved the water and managed to get his tongue stuck to an iceberg, at one point. He wasn't so interested in this discussion but did enjoy Busy boats by Ant Parker, that we read along with this. Lovely rhyme and mentions why boats float.

This is linked to Science Sparks.