Maya McFadden photo
Testing forces inside Kara Bartunek's third-grade class.
Conte West Hills School third graders Olivia and Deon played tug-of-war in their classroom — not to see who was the strongest, but instead to conduct a science experiment to learn about forces.
That was the scene in a first-floor classroom at the 511 Chapel St. school this past Friday as third-grade teacher Kara Bartunek led a science-centered lesson about forces and motion.
Bartunek has dedicated every Friday this school year to integrating science into the entire day’s lessons, including reading and writing instruction. She was inspired to implement the science focus once a week because of her love for the district’s newly implemented K‑5 science curriculum by Smithsonian.
“There’s so much learning that can happen in one science lesson,” Bartunek said.
In recent weeks the students have been learning about forces like pushing and pulling by performing science experiments in class, which also have been helping the students to work on writing and reading skills by documenting their experiment data and notes and reading step-by-step instructions for the experiments.
Before Bartunek kicked off Friday’s experiment of the week, the class of 12 students finished up a Fundations literacy lesson in which in the final five minutes students practiced spelling “explore” and exploring with the help of Bartunek’s reminder to “drop that ‘e’ before adding ‘ing.’ ”
Students then took two minutes to stretch after sitting at their desks throughout the lesson and then reported to the classroom rug.
While they sat together on the class’s colorful polka dot rug, Bartunek reviewed the previous lessons they learned about forces and motion in recent weeks like “not all forces cause movement.”
The students’ Friday experiment replicated the push-and-pull movements of a game of tug-of-war. They tested the impacts of weak pulls and strong pulls.
Bartunek first showed students a clip of kids pulling a tug-of-war rope and asked them to describe what they noticed about the force used in the game.
The students called out that the biggest kids were at the end of the rope on each side acting as anchors and that the rope was moved back and forth towards the end after staying still at the start of the game.
Bartunek repeated the students’ findings as they shared them with the class.
“Were the forces balanced or unbalanced?” Bartunek asked.
One student answered “balanced” as the rope did not move much when the children in the video they watched began pulling from opposite ends.
The question to test Friday was: What happens to balanced and unbalanced forces when applied to an object at rest?
Before Bartunek sent the students to investigate with force in small groups she walked them through the directions for creating a tug-of-war board.
Bartunek demonstrated how to attach two rubber bands to a wooden block placed at the center of the page and marking three points on the paper at 13, 14.5, and 16 centimeters from the block.
After demonstrating each step of preparing and executing the experiment, Bartunek sent the students to work in small groups of four in different corners of the classroom.
The first step students took before preparing their board was assigning each other a job of being speaker, builder, tester, or organizer.
Every few weeks Bartunek changes the students’ small groups to encourage them to learn to work with all of their peers. The jobs each student takes on during experiments also gives them the chance to highlight their own strengths.
They then folded their poster boards, taped them to the floor, and began attaching the rubber bands to the wooden block, and used a rule to measure three test points.
When students became hesitant that the experiment would not work she encouraged them by asking “why not give it a whirl and see?”
For each test two students sat on opposite ends of the board and looped their fingers into the rubber bands and stretched them to the different points on the board.
In one group, third-grader Lana put her finger holding the band on point A while another student Julia stretched the band to point A on his side. Their partner Olivia held the wooden block still in the center. On the count of three Olivia let go of the block and Deon looked closely to see if the block moved.
The students tracked the results in data sheets in their explorer notebooks.
Halfway through the class Bartunek announced to the students a sound check and tasked them with using their inside table voices.
The students shared the job of holding the rubber bands throughout the experiment.
When the students held one rubber band at point A (13 cm) and the second at point C (16 cm) away from the wooden block they noticed the force was unbalanced and caused the block to move toward the side pulling from point C.
After 20 minutes of experimenting, at around 11:35 a.m., the students gathered again on the rug to discuss their findings.
“I like the way that we didn’t give up and just kept trying,” Bartunek said to the class.
When asked what they noticed during the experiment one third grader shared that on two separate tests when their group pulled both bands to point C, they saw the block move. “I don’t get why it was unbalanced,” the student said.
Once the students returned from gym and lunch, Bartunek said they would try a few more tests to see if they got the same results.
Bartunek.
Bartunek, who has taught at Conte for 18 years, came up with the plan to focus Fridays on science because she said it is “difficult to fit science and social studies in the day.” Typically she only is able to dedicate 20 to 25 minutes to social studies and science each day.
She also found the science focus fit well with Conte’s theme to help develop explorers and innovators.
The Smithsonian curriculum “encompasses everything” including reading, writing, math, and social studies, Bartunek said.
The hands on activities get the students excited about learning when they are challenged to test an experiment or their theories.
The day of exploration and innovation has helped students with behavioral problems and to build their confidence in several subjects at once. It has also helped to build Bartunek’s classroom community, she said, as students work to celebrate their struggles and accomplishments together.
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