Hawthorne star class

Published 8:00 pm Friday, February 12, 2021

By Submitted

: Joan Boyenga’s first-grade class has been studying how sound is produced and how it travels. They have talked about how they can make sounds with their voices or by striking objects, while also considering how they know they are making a sound. Students worked together to come up with ideas of how sound is produced and travels. Students predicted whether whispers, normal or yelling voices would travel farther. After touching their throats to feel their voices’ vibrations, as well as striking their hands onto desks to feel vibrations, the students concluded that sounds are vibrations, and they then discussed their findings with each other and the whole class. The class then experimented with making telephones out of paper cups to transmit sound. Students first held a paper cup over their mouths and talked into it, feeling the vibration on the cup. Second, students held a string tightly connected to the cup and spoke into the cup to see if they could feel the vibrations on the string. Third, they rubbed the string and listened with the cup to their ears to see what they noticed. Fourth, they had the cup up to their ear and plucked the string to see what they noticed. Lastly, they each had a partner and took turns talking into one cup and listening in the other to see if the sound would travel from one cup to the other. The students came to the conclusion that the cup telephone works due to vibrations traveling from one cup through the string to the other cup. This fun activity allowed the students to explore the scientific method of developing a hypothesis, testing it through experimentation and then modifying that hypothesis based on the data collected to come up with a conclusion. Students will continue to build on this skill as they grow up and complete many other activities at Hawthorne and in the Albert Lea Area School District. Provided