Rocket Science!

As part of Discovery Time Room 1A have been working on following instructions. testing out theories and asking questions to find out more. As we are learning about 'Flight' for Inquiry we thought that making some 'Balloon Rockets' would be a great way to practice these skills. Before we got started we wrote down what we thought might happen if we put large or small amounts of air into the balloon and why we thought this. We also talked about how changing the direction of the balloon's neck would change the way it moved. Next we followed instructions to build our balloon rockets so we could test out whether what we thought was right. We had a lot of fun and Mrs Pupuke was very impressed with how we worked together to build our rockets. We discovered that the air moving out of a balloon pushes it in the opposite direction. We thought that putting a large amount of air in the balloon would mean it would move further and more quickly and we were right! Later in the week we discovered that the scientific name for the movement made by the air moving out of the balloon is called 'Thrust'. If you want to try this out for yourself at home here are some instructions:
http://www.sciencebob.com/experiments/balloonrocket.php