After a busy start to the year learning about Wool, Miss Townsend’s 7/8 class have moved their attention to Eggs in their Agriculture lessons for Term 2. Our students have ‘eggs’amined an ‘eggs’tremely vast range of ‘eggs’periments and have achieved some ‘eggs’traodinary results!
The first task was to predict the weight of each component of an egg as a percentage of the whole.
Students separated their egg into the yolk, albumen (white) and shell then weighed each component. It turns out that the egg white is the heaviest part, followed by the yolk and then shell. Our second experiment was called ‘Bouncy Eggs’. By placing an egg in a cup of vinegar for a week, the shell was broken down to leave a rubbery egg ‘ball’ which bounced! But if you try this at home, take care not to bounce your egg too hard – it will break and it will certainly be messy!
Experiment three was titled ‘How Strong are Eggs’. Each group of students moulded a small amount of clay to make a ‘cushion’ for four eggs, arranged them in a square and placed a tray on top. The big question was – ‘ how many school dictionaries could we place in the tray before the eggs break?’ Guesses varied from 3 to 23 and so the experiment began. What an amazing and unexpected result! We created a tower of 29 dictionaries and still the eggs hadn’t cracked, so we replaced the dictionaries with a student standing in the tray! Believe it or not, four regular, fresh chicken eggs can hold the weight of a person (plus a few dictionaries!) before giving way. What an amazing feat of strength.
Our final experiment involved creating chalk from egg shells. This was great fun, and resulted in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours of chalk sticks which students can use (or give to a little sister or brother). The recipe is very simple (just eggshells, flour, water and food colouring) so it will be easy to try at home.
Of course the natural progression after studying eggs is to move on to chickens – and that’s what is coming up next in the 7/8 class with our chickens due to hatch any day.
A big thank you to all the staff who donated eggshells for our chalk experiment and to Damien Adams and Kylie Woolford who donated fertile eggs for our incubator.