Show and Tell

My students love Show and Tell. They give one clue and three students can guess what it is. Then they give another clue and three more students can guess. They can give one more clue before revealing what they brought. Usually we guess what is in the Show and Tell bag. Not today. I don't remember the clues, but I will always remember this show...

Yes this is a diaper. He was going to bring Legos...as usual..."Why don't you bring something different?" his mother asked. "How about a diaper," he replied. The rest is history.

What he didn't expect was my reaction..."Let's do a science experiment with the diaper," said Mrs. Reck. I called to make sure the family didn't want the diaper back. We observed, we hypothesized and we experimented to see how much water a diaper could hold. Never have I had the children's attention like I did with this experiment...Well maybe a couple of other times! 

This diaper held quite a lot of water. 10 of our measuring cups. On the eleventh dump of water when I turned it upside down it had reached saturation. What can you learn with a diaper? Quite a lot! Absorption, and saturation. Observation and predicting. 

Tomorrow we dissect the diaper to see what is allowing absorption and what is doing the absorbing. 

I wonder what tomorrow's Show and Tell will bring...

Yesterday, I promised to show you the pictures of the owls one of my sweet owlets made as a gift for me. We use these to formulate the questions we ask the Show and Teller each day. We ask one question for each owl about what has been shown.

I bet you can't even imagine the questions that went with the diaper. We learned a lot today about different names for human waste and how to safely dispose of it!