🧽 Soak it up: the whole packet

🧽 Soak it up · kindergarten · 1 day of testing · free · 30 minutes a sitting

My days, if the fair is 14 days away

Count back from your fair day and write in each date. Fewer days than this? The jobs share days, in this order; nothing is skipped.

Dates from my teacher

• My question is due
• Testing starts
• My results table and graph are due
• My board is due

In this packet

1. 🗓️ My project plan
2. 💭 My hypothesis
3. 🧺 Change, measure, keep the same
4. 🪜 My steps
5. 📊 My results
6. 📓 My logbook
7. ✅ My conclusion
8. ✂️ Board titles to cut out
9. 🏅 The judge's questions and my certificate

If I change what soaks it up, then how many spoonfuls it holds before it drips will ________________, because _____________________________________________

What I think will happen, in my own words:

3 levels × 3 tries at each = 9 tries in all. If anything you keep the same changes, you won't know which change made the difference.

What I need

• 🧽 A sponge or cloth, for wiping up
• 🧻 Paper towels
• 👕 A cotton T-shirt or tea towel: a tea towel or an old T-shirt
• 🥄 A spoon
• 🚰 Water from the tap
• 🍽️ Small plates or saucers, all the same: 1
• 🖍️ Crayons or markers

Be safe: 💧 Water · 🧽 A bit messy

1. Lay the sponge flat on the plate.
2. Grown-up: Your grown-up drips water on it, one spoonful at a time.
3. You count the spoonfuls out loud. Say stop when it drips onto the plate.
4. Grown-up: Your grown-up squeezes it out, and you test it two more times.
5. Test the paper towel three times, then the cloth three times.
6. Colour a box for every spoonful. Which one held the most?

Write each number in your results table the moment you measure it.

I changed: Soaker   I measured: how many spoonfuls it holds before it drips (spoonfuls)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: soaker along the bottom, spoonfuls up the side)

What I noticed: ______________________________________________

Write something every day you work on it, even the days you only gather things. More days? The three-page logbook prints from peabody.kids/science-fair/templates/logbook.

My hypothesis was ☐ right ☐ partly right ☐ not right.

I know because my numbers show:

What surprised me, or what might have gone wrong (7th and up):

Next time I would test:

Idea: Change a second thing: test each one folded in half as well as flat.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: which soaks up the most: a sponge, a paper towel or a cloth?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing what soaks it up would change how many spoonfuls it holds before it drips, and I wrote down why.
3. What did you change, and what did you measure? Say something like: I changed what soaks it up (Sponge, Paper towel, Cloth) and measured how many spoonfuls it holds before it drips in spoonfuls.
4. What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? Say something like: I kept the same spoon and the same size of each one the same, so only what soaks it up was different.
5. How many times did you test it? Say something like: 3 times at each of my 3 levels, and I found the middle number.
6. What did you find out? Show me in your numbers. Say something like: Look at my table: Sponge and Cloth gave different numbers, and here's the pattern.
7. Was your hypothesis right? How do you know? Say something like: My numbers show whether I was right, partly right or not, and I can show you where.
8. Did anything go wrong, or surprise you? Say something like: One try was odd, so I did it again and wrote it in my logbook.
9. If you did it again, what would you change or test next? Say something like: I'd change a second thing: test each one folded in half as well as flat.