Kidamerinks: A Dirty Experiment

Saturday, September 3, 2011

A Dirty Experiment

Get ready to get DIRTY!!

When I told my Kidamerink that we were going to play in the dirt today, he looked at me in disbelief and said, "Really? I actually get to get my hands dirty?" When I replied yes, he exclaimed, "How cool! You never let me do that!!" Hmmm, I swear I'm not that controlling... but I don't like messy hands for the most part. My obsessive compulsiveness is rubbing off I guess. But, today we made an exception and got exceptionally dirty!

Since ourLetter this week has been T, and our theme has largely been about Tractors I decided to create a Biology lesson on soil. Since Tractors are used to plant/harvest food I deemed it appropriate. See the connection? Maybe I'm reaching, but it seemed like a good excuse to play in the dirt - which is every kids dream, right?

Anyways, Here is what we did.

First of all, we started out by reading, "Dig In - Learn About Dirt," by Pamela Hall.

I then layed out our, "A Dirty Experiment" packet on the table. I am a visual person, so it helped to lay everything out in order to help us along with this experiment.

I may be a little OCD, but I felt the need to have organization when dealing with a potential mess...

Then, we got busy and procured some good ol' dirty DIRT!!

And, this may be self explanatory... but we placed a good heap of dirt <HERE>.

We started to dig in to see what we could find.

And, we tried to describe it and circled our answers on the sheet provided.

Then we started separating it into the specified piles.

Here was our "Sandy" pile - which was the majority of our good heap of dirt. We learned that we have very sandy soil.

Here is our "Silt" pile.

Our "Clay" pile.

And our "Plants/Critters" Pile. Luckily, we didn't find any big critters!! We had a lot of roots though.

All of our dirt separated into their designated piles.

A close up of our dirt. See how Sandy it actually was?

Then, we recorded our findings. My Kidamerink had lost a little bit of interest at this point. Well, I take that back. He just wanted to keep playing in the dirt, rather than draw or color an elaborate picture. So, here is his "quick" interpretation of our findings. The dots were sand, and the circle was a plant. :)