📄 Paper kinds and water climbing: the whole packet

📄 Paper kinds and water climbing · 2nd–6th grade · 1 day of testing · about $1 · 45 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 the kind of paper, then how high the colour climbs up the strip in ten minutes will ________________, because _____________________________________________

What I think will happen, in my own words:

4 levels × 3 tries at each = 12 tries in all. If anything you keep the same changes, you won't know which change made the difference.

What I need

• 🧻 Paper towels: 1 sheet
• ⚪ Round paper coffee filters: 3
• 📄 Paper: a sheet of printer paper
• 🧻 Tissue paper: 3 sheets
• 🌈 Food colouring: one dark colour
• 🚰 Water from the tap
• 🫙 A clear jar or tall glass: a wide glass
• ✏️ A pencil
• ⏱️ A stopwatch or a kitchen timer
• ✂️ Kid scissors
• 📏 A ruler
• 🩹 Tape

Be safe: 💧 Water · 🧽 A bit messy

1. Pour water into a wide glass and stir in lots of food colouring.
2. Cut twelve strips, 1 cm wide and 12 cm long: three from each kind of paper.
3. Write the kind of paper at the top of each strip in pencil.
4. Tape the tops of four strips, one of each kind, to a pencil with gaps between them.
5. Lay the pencil across the glass and add water until the bottom 1 cm of each strip dips in.
6. Start the timer. After ten minutes, lift the pencil out and lay the strips flat.
7. Measure from the bottom of each strip up to where the colour stops, and write it in your table.
8. Do it two more times with new strips.
9. Find the mean for each paper, and draw a bar graph.

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

I changed: Paper   I measured: how high the colour climbs up the strip in ten minutes (cm)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: paper along the bottom, cm 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: use cold water and warm tap water, and graph the climb for each paper at both temperatures.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: which paper pulls water up the highest?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing the kind of paper would change how high the colour climbs up the strip in ten minutes, and I wrote down why.
3. What did you change, and what did you measure? Say something like: I changed the kind of paper (Paper towel, Coffee filter, Printer paper, Tissue paper) and measured how high the colour climbs up the strip in ten minutes in cm.
4. What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? Say something like: I kept strips of the same width and length and the bottom 1 cm of every strip in the water the same, so only the kind of paper was different.
5. How many times did you test it? Say something like: 3 times at each of my 4 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: Paper towel and Tissue paper 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: use cold water and warm tap water, and graph the climb for each paper at both temperatures.