Squishy Eggs, Mealworm Larva and Winning Airplanes

This has been an exciting science month in 4th grade - hands-on science is one of my very FAVORITE things, so I love the amazing science we get to do this time of year.  In the past three weeks, we've had:
*a paper airplane contest that let us practice our scientific method of finding a problem (how to make our planes go further), coming up with a hypothesis, researching it (we love Google!), and then trying it again with improvements.  So fun!
*the addition of mealworms to our classroom.  They will, hopefully, be turning into darkling beetles by the time school is out.  Right now, we are experimenting with them to see if they prefer to live in cornmeal or flax.
*Squishy eggs!  We put a raw egg in vinegar for three days to see what happened to the eggshell if it sat in an acid.  What a fun, stinky experiment!  We're hoping that Mrs. Burgey will put the video of our final squishy egg experiment on BGTV - we tested whether or not it would bounce!

Suspensions & Solutions

We spent the past week in science studying what happens when 2 objects interact - which things dissolve, and what makes a suspension and what makes a solution. We learned that anything that gets mixed into a liquid, but doesn't completely dissolve is a suspension.  It still has pieces suspended in the liquid.  We found out that you can get those pieces out by using a filter.
Then we learned about solutions, where what's mixed in completely dissolves, and you don't see pieces any more.  We read that you can separate the parts by leaving it set out in a shallow bowl, and the water will evaporate.  Our groups let their solutions sit out in pie tins over the weekend, and had an interesting result this morning!