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At the house of the March Hare, Alice invites herself to tea with the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse, and the March Hare. In this activity, children will have their own tea party with small bottles of various shapes scattered about the table. At this tea party, children will create equations to express their predictions of volumes held by the various shaped vessels.
Did You Know?
- Tea was used as far back as 2,337 BC. In China, monkeys were trained to pick tea leaves from hard-to-reach places. Today, there are at least 3,000 varieties of tea available.
- Volume is the amount of matter - solid, liquid, or gas - a container will hold inside.
- Equations are sentences used in math to show two or more things that are equal.
Materials: What You'll Need (for each pair of students)
- an assortment of bottles (two with equal volume)
- measuring cups
- a tray
- a turkey baster (for the class)
- jugs of colored water
- colored pencils or crayons
- paper, to record predictions and observations
To Get Ready:
- Divide the assorted containers, measuring cups, and turkey basters and place them on each pair's tray ahead of time.
- You might also want to color the water with food coloring.
To Start, Ask:
Which bottles do you think might hold the same amount of liquid (have the same volume)?
Activity: Now, Try It!
- Take a careful look at the assortment of bottles. Which bottles might hold the most? Which bottles might hold the least? Make some predictions.
- On a piece of paper, draw some pictures which show your predictions.
- To test your theory about which bottles might hold the same amount of liquid, fill one bottle to the very top with water. Using a turkey baster, or pouring very carefully, transfer the colored water from the first bottle to the other bottle that you predicted has the same volume. Was your prediction accurate? Record your findings.
- Now, choose two bottles of different shapes. Which bottle do you think will hold more? Do you think it will hold two times as much? Draw an equation to represent your prediction. Test your theory by filling one bottle to the top with water, then transfer the water to the other bottle. Which bottle held more? How much more liquid did it hold? Revise your prediction to accurately show the relationship.
- Try experimenting with other bottles. Will two different bottles filled with water fit into a third bottle? Will one bottle hold three times as much liquid as another, or will it only hold half as much?
Questions to Think about and Ask:
- Were you surprised by any of your findings?
- Which shape of bottle seemed to hold the most liquid?
- Did any of the bottles have exactly the same volume?
- What was the relationship between the different bottles?
- Can you put your bottles in order from least volume to greatest volume?
Career Connection:
Chemists are scientists who experiment with different liquids to find out how they mix together. If you enjoyed experimenting with volume, imagine what you might do if you were a chemist!
Assess What Happened: (Students reflect)
Invite students to develop their own recipe for tea. Write the recipe on an index or recipe card and make an ad to advertise it to their classmates.
Connect It to the Story!
In her travels in Wonderland, Alice comes upon an unusual tea party attended by the Mad Hatter, a March Hare, and a Dormouse. She sees a very large table that is scattered with cups, saucers, plates, and pots of tea. The conversations at the Mad Tea Party are very odd indeed and make no sense at all, but the strangeness doesn't end there. When the plates and cups are dirty and the riddles remain unsolved, everyone moves to the next seat and the party begins all over again. At this tea party, the March Hare's clock has stopped at 6 o'clock ... which means it's always teatime! You too can have your own crazy tea party by pouring "tea" into all sorts of bottles and finding two with the same volume.
Connect It to Standards:
"As a result of their activities in grades K-4, all students should develop an understanding of the properties of earth materials [which includes] water." (NCTM Standards)
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