Today in Theme Studies, we looked at a particular material, a piece of white paper. As a building material, paper isn't very good. It's not very strong, doesn't hold a lot of weight, and rips easily. So we brainstormed ways that we thought we could make the paper stronger.
We came up with two main ways. We could put several pieces of paper together to make the paper thicker and we could fold the paper. With these two ways in mind, students tested out our ideas.
Each student received several pieces of paper to use to try out both methods. They were allowed to choose the type of glue they wanted to use (white glue or glue stick), and they were allowed to cut the paper if they wanted more pieces. They were instructed to find out two things. They were to see if doing these two things to the paper did make it stronger, and they were asked to see if they could figure out which method make the strongest paper. We decided as a class that an easy test to see the strength would be to rip the paper.
After our experiments, we came to three conclusions:
1) Folding paper increased its strength.
2) Layering and gluing paper increased its strength.
3) Folded paper was stronger than layered paper.
Following this activity, we briefly discussed whether we could apply our new knowledge to other materials as well. For example, would nailing several pieces of wood together be stronger than a single board? We decided together that this information was useful when working with other materials as well.
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