Second graders are closing out the year making play-doh with the best properties--play-doh that's not too sticky or too gritty.  With all the suggested improvements, we came pretty close!

Students received their engineering notebooks back, and multiple recipes are included in their notebooks as the last entry!  Make some play-doh over the summer, and let me know how it turns out.  Did you improve the process we thought produced the best quality play-doh?  Or was the process we came up with the best?  Happy summer!

Second graders are connecting what they learned about rearranging pieces of matter to create a new object.  The same is true with our play-doh process.  In both processes, we used the same ingredients--flour, salt, and water.  How we arranged those ingredients affected the play-doh we got.  We'll close out the year making the best play-doh with the properties we desire--play-doh that is smooth and not too sticky!

One second grade class added salt, then water and then flour.
The other second grade class decided to make the water hot before adding it to the salt, and then added the flour.

Each play-doh was smoother and less sticky than the original process!  Each student has a copy in their notebooks.

So the second graders have created their tests...and now it's time to investigate the materials used to make play-doh!

The three ingredients we will be using to make play-doh are flour, salt, and water.  Students determined the properties of each material by observing them with their sense of sight and their sense of touch.  They also hypothesized what each material would do to the mixture.  

Second graders agreed that:
1.  Adding more salt would make the play-doh grittier, since it felt like sand.
2.  Adding more flour would make the play-doh drier and possibly softer since it didn't feel wet or hard.
3.  Adding more water would make the play-doh stickier because it was wet!

Now on to make some play-doh!