Summer SAVY, Session 2 Day 2, Fission and Fusion: Nuclear Engineering 101 (5th-6th)
Good evening, SAVY parents and students! What a wonderful day 2 of our nuclear energy week! I am completely amazed at the curiosity of these young scientists! It was a joyful day full of learning, creativity, and fun! I love their atomic energy and enthusiasm. It is so fitting for a camp all about energy!
Morning Activities Included:
We began the day with our morning meeting check-in. Discussions included last night’s evening activities that they wanted to share. I loved hearing about swimming, ice cream stops, and the yummy dinners! As a whole class, we then completed a review/challenge game on the atomic structure. It was a friendly, competitive game that involved answering questions from yesterday’s lesson and working on different strategies to answer questions and get on the leaderboard! After the review game, we dove into the atomic structure more deeply by taking doodle-guided notes from a Google slideshow. Students labeled, color-coded, and used their own creativity to take notes from the presentation. We watched a short video on how to accurately describe just how small an atom’s mass is and how we can compare it to the mass of other everyday objects. We completed our doodle notes and moved right into a discussion about the periodic table trends and arrangement. Ask your scientist to sing the “Periodic Table Song” for you. It is a fun, but tough one!
Afternoon Activities Included:
We began our afternoon session with research and observations on a list of vocabulary terms, where they created a “graffiti map” in small groups. These maps connected all of the terms we had learned about during the first half of the day. I cannot wait for you to see these, but you will have to wait as they are a work in progress! We then talked about nuclear chain reactions and completed a lab to simulate how this works. The scientists lined up dominoes in certain positions and caused them to move by using a ruler for the “spark”. They began a CER (claim, evidence, reasoning) chart to predict and prove what happened during the chain reaction. The second part of the lab was to blow up a balloon and release all of them at the same time to simulate how nuclear energy is released. They left today with their balloons! We ended the day by recapping what we learned throughout the day!
Questions to ask at home:
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How is the periodic table of elements arranged?
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What is the most reactive family (group) on the periodic table of elements?
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What is a nuclear chain reaction? What are ways you can simulate this at home?
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What is a nuclear reactor?
I am so proud of our young scientists! I am eager to dig into comparing/contrasting fission and fusion more in depth tomorrow! Have a wonderful evening! 🙂
Mrs. Jenkins and Ms. Hannah