How Can We Prove How Sound Travels Best: Solids, Liquids or Gas

Sound Travels Best Through...

These steps guide us through our many scientific explorations. The students are beginning to grapple with, "This won't work." "We need to try it some other way!" And "What if we tried this instead?"

There's nothing like the moment when the students start to take on the responsibility of planning their own experiments to answer their own questions. In a very slow process, the children are overcoming the obstacles such as the differences between experiments and research, guessing and hypothesizing and test validity - will it happen the same way every time we do it?

Some of their ideas blew my mind. One group tested sound using the cup as a solid, the water in the cup and then just the tuning fork in the air. What they found...well, I guess you have to ask.  Others struggled with the idea of testing sound using their ears to measure. This became an interesting conversation that brought about revisiting that sounds are vibrations.