Not to eat, of course.

Over the past couple of days in Science, students have been practicing what it means to be a scientist. They have been exploring the scientific process, experimenting, asking big questions and being creative. We started the process with experimenting on how to make paper airplanes go further. Last week, students were given a mysterious substance supposedly found by Mr. H’s brother, Bob in an alley near our house. We had a great time experimenting with it and studying it’s properties. Do you remember what properties are? We can find the properties of objects around us by using our 5 senses; what we see, feel, hear, smell and taste. So,

Properties are the things or words we use to describe different objects so we can tell them apart.

We played with and investigated the properties of Oobleck to help us understand what made Oobleck different from other substances like water or play-do. The students had some wonderful properties they discovered as they worked with the Oobleck.
We then held a scientific convention to decide upon some “truths” about Oobleck and come up with a set of laws that were true about Oobleck. We are now in the design phase of the process where students are designing a space ship that could travel to and explore a planet of Oobleck using the properties of Oobleck as a design guide.

Oobleck, of course, is a real substance. It’s very distinctive property of being both a solid and a liquid has made Scientists curious for a long time. When left alone, Oobleck will act like a liquid. However, when squeezed, hit or pushed on, it will suddenly act like a solid, cracking and breaking under pressure. Scientists still do not know why it does this .

If you have lots of time and lots of Oobleck, you could do this:

Here is a video showing what Oobleck does when you put it on top of a very loud speaker!!! What do you notice? Would water do this is you did the same thing? Why don’t you try it and find out?