Fourth Grade, Earth Science, Lesson 1

hello fourth graders it's mrs bellatosh again and we are starting our next unit and with the idea that there's this big earth here you might get the idea that this is our next our earth science unit and you would be right and have this beautiful big globe of the earth here and when we look at the earth like this we think wow the earth is just all blue water and some continents there's africa and let's see there's australia there's north america and south america so you think to yourself it's just all of that but in fact if we cut the earth open we would see that it is very different the earth is kind of like an apple when you look at an apple like this and let's pretend you've never eaten an apple before you think wow this thing is just all red skin or this is the entire part of the apple this is what it looks like all the way through but when we cut the apple open we see that most of the apple is actually not the red skin right the skin is this very very thin part then we have the delicious sweet fruit and we have the core of the apple well that is exactly what the earth is like if we slice open the earth so on this side over here we see the water and the continents but if we slice open the earth we see that it's very thin that part that we live on is the crust and it is very very small part of the earth most of the earth is this part the mantle and then on the inside is the core just like we have but even if the crust is very thin it's always changing right mean you can go hiking and you can go up tall mountain you can go to the desert you can go into valley the surface of the earth is constantly changing even okay before we move any further would like us to get out our science notebook and we're going to glue this page in it's called soil observations so glue that in make sure you put the date and we number the page mine is on page 18 and i'm going to go back to the table of contents i'm going to put nine soil observations and i'm going to put the page number 18 you might have different page number okay then i'm going to go back to the soil observations and i'm going to put that aside for minute because we're going to open the bags yippee opened my bag already and these are the things that want you to notice so there's bag of earth material and it's called it's got an and on it there's bag of earth material and it's got an on it there's bag of earth material that has an on it there's bag of earth material that has on it we're gonna look at all of those today and you should also have magnifying glass in your kit now there should be another little bag that has some shells and some maybe some rocks or minerals and just gave those to you as little present they're all for you to keep you don't need to return any of these materials to me you get to keep the magnifying glass all of the rocks anything that's in the kit that is yours to keep okay and also from the first unit all right so we're also going to take out these two vials so and the rest of it i'm gonna put aside in your science notebook want you to label each one of those one two three four with these letters soil number one is an that's the bag that have labeled soil number two is soil number three is and soil number four is rd when you open the materials in few minutes want to make sure that you label the paper plates with the letter of each one so that you don't forget which material is which because we're gonna compare them against each other so make sure that you label one one rd one and one so you've labeled your paper plates so make sure you have those labels on them and we're gonna start with the soil and number one and we're going to empty it onto paper plate or piece of paper you're going to get your magnifying glass and want you to observe these materials are they all the same size are they all the same color take few minutes and describe these earth materials with your class if you went to carpenter in second grade you know the names of some of these rocks right so rock that's about this size that is pebble this is pebble-sized rock and rock that is about this size is gravel that's gravel and then there's some rocks that that are little smaller and that would be sand and there might even be some silt in there so we've got pebbles gravel sand and silt but that's not the only thing that see in there see some crystals right see some pretty beautiful crystals but see few twigs and few leaves maybe even just tiny little bit of soil and what wrote in box number one just wrote something said lot of pebbles lot of gravel some sand and silt and very little leaves or soil okay so i'm going to put this aside and now i'm going to look at bag number two which is the letter i'm going to dump letter onto piece of paper or paper plate and now i'm going to spread it out and take look at these material this is very interesting this one is very different than the one we just saw right so this is letter and take minute and look at the material and describe it with your class when looked at this material really didn't see any pebbles don't have pebbles in mine at least see lot of small gravel see lot of sand and silt and see just maybe few leaves and twigs very very little so that's what wrote in my science journal wrote no pebbles small gravel lot of sand and silt very little leaves and or soil now we're going to put that aside and we are going to look at number three the letter have letter and i'm gonna dump it onto piece of paper or paper plate and i'm gonna spread it around very interesting and i'm going to ask you to describe it with your class so mine is very very different from the other ones that i've looked at so there are few pebbles do have few there are some pebbles and there is some gravel there is some sand and silt but it looks to me like most of this is lot of leaves and soil and so that's what wrote in my science notebook so now i'm going to put this one away and i'm going to get out the next one which is rd so this is the last bag of soil or earth materials that we're going to look at i'm putting it onto another paper plate and wow every single one of them has been so different very interesting so take minute and talk about it with your clients so this one is very very different don't have any pebbles in mine so said no pebbles do have some small gravel so wrote small gravel in my notebook i'm feeling it can don't really feel very much sand do see some sand so i'm gonna say some sand but most of what see here is silt and do you remember from second grade there was something even smaller than silt and it was clay think that this one has mostly silt and clay have few little leaves but hardly any it's mostly silk so want to talk little bit about how all of these very different soils are similar what are some things that these soils or these earth materials have in common first of all all of these are have some type of an earth material component to it right there are pebbles gravel sand silt and clay so all of them have some of these materials now they're in different amounts right like this one has lot of pebbles this one doesn't have any pebbles some of them have more of the darker soil and that darker soil guys is actually called humus humus not hummus but humus and humus is dead plants organic matter so when tree dies it decomposes it breaks down and then it goes and it becomes part of the soil so soil actually consists of two things things that were living dead plants and things that were never living rocks and soil rocks and sand and silt and things like that now we're going to put some of these materials in some vials didn't have enough vials for everybody to get four vials so i'm going to ask that you guys take turns half of the class is going to put the materials from letter and letter in vial each one and of their own vial and half of the class is going to do letters bag and bag rd in vial so this is how you do it you take the vial the lid off and like to fold it up like taco i'm gonna take my paper plate and i'm gonna bend it and i'm going to pour it in up until the line do you see where the line is and i'm gonna pour it in until it gets to that line and then i'm going to stop and the extra material i'm going to put back in the bag now have put material in each of these vials i'm doing four so we can look at them all together so and the other thing i'm going to do is i've put little label on the top of each one either rdd or if you have some tape you might also want to put it on the side of the vial so that we know exactly which vial goes with which bag and now i'm going to add some water to the vials and want you and you guys can do this too and want you to watch what happens to the vials look at this one this one's very interesting look at this there were some bubbles that were coming up through the material and i'm going to add some water to this one okay and now i'm going to put the top on each one remember that's why it's kind of important that you keep track of which is which and then i'm going to shake it so this one is look at that there's bunch of stuff floating on the top okay i'm going to put it down this one is it got very opaque didn't it and more of that stuff is floating on the top all right this is see stuff settling out of the water do you see how it falls down and this one is look at this isn't this interesting some of it is still dry at the bottom the water has not gone away all the way through now it has it's very very interesting okay now we are going to let these sit and we're not going to touch them mean you can observe them don't open them don't do anything next week we're going to look at them again and see if we can find out some more things about these materials